News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac's "Gazette de Leyde" 9781501701511

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NEWS AND POLITICS IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION Jean Luzac's Gazette de Leyde

JEREMY

D. POPKIN

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 1989 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1989 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks. 2015 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 89-31379

Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. ISBN 978-1-5°17-0071-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that

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News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

Also by Jeremy D. Popkin :

The Right-Wing Press in France, I 792- I 800 Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (edited with Jack Censer)

To Beate

Contents

[1] [2] [3] [4] [ 5] [6] [ 7]

[8] [9] [ 1 0] [1 1]

Preface Abbreviations News and European Culture in the Eighteenth Century The Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper The Eighteenth-Century European Press Making News'in the Eighteenth Century Producing a Newspaper in the Eighteenth Century The Gautte de Leyde's Readership The Gazette de Leyde and the Crises of the 1 770S Engagement and Disillusionment: Jean Luzac and the Gautte de Leyde from 1 782 to 1 787 The Challenge of the French Revolution An Old Regime Gazette in the Revolutionary Maelstrom The Gautte de Leyde, Politics, and Journalism Sources and Bibliography Index [vii]

ix XIII

24 46 68 99

1 20 1 37 1 58 1 88 215 249 267 287

Preface

T his book seeks to establish the importance of the newspaper press in European life in the decades preceding the French Revolution and thereby to illuminate some previously neglected aspects of eigh­ teenth-century life and of the history of journalism. The European newspaper press before 1 789 is not a subject that has attracted many scholars of the period. Peter Gay's two-volume survey, The Enlighten­ ment, for example, contains only two passing references to newspapers; R. R. Palmer's two-volume work, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, has no index entries for either "newspapers" or "press." And yet there is no question that the philosophes who populate Gay's study and the politi­ cians who make a new world in Palmer's were regular newspaper read­ ers. Specialized works on the history of the press do discuss the news­ papers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but those surveys that aim to provide a grand synthesis of the history of journalism, such as Robert Desmond's four-volume work on news reporting and An­ thony Smith's short book, The Newspaper: An International History, tend to give the subject short shrift. They acknowledge that the first newspapers appeared in Germany and the Netherlands soon after 1 600, and they mention the foundation of the Gazette de France in 1 63 1 , but for all practical purposes the continental European press then disappears from their view until 1 789. Historians' neglect of the news journals that brought the thinkers and doers of the eighteenth century their knowl­ edge of what was happening in the political world obscures a vital part of the past; journalism scholars' unfamiliarity with the European press before the French Revolution skews their picture of how the modern news media came to be. [ix]

[x]

Preface

At the center of this book stands the story of a great but forgotten newspaper: the Gazette de Leyde edited by Jean Luzac. In its day, it was as well known all over Europe as the New York Times is to educated and politically concerned individuals throughout the world today. Its editor received mail from Voltaire, from George Washington, and from the ministers of all the crowned heads of Europe. Its readers were scattered from Boston to Calcutta, from Glasgow to Constantinople. Unique among the newspapers of its day because of the respect it commanded, Jean Luzac's Gazette de Leyde was the culmination of the first century and a half of European journalism, when the role of the newspaper was to give an impersonal chronicle of ongoing events. But the Gazette de Leyde also stood at the threshold of a new era in journalistic history, one in which the newspaper would be called on to represent the force of public opinion and to shape history, as well as to record it. Through this close examination of the environment that produced the Gazette de Leyde , how it gathered and printed its reports, its relationship with its readers, and the way it depicted the great events of three critical decades, I hope to contribute both to a better understanding of the age in which the paper appeared and to our grasp of the origins of one of the great forces that shape our world today, the news media. When I first began to consider working on the history of newspapers and journalism during my years of graduate study, many of my pro­ fessors did their best to discourage me. They were persuaded, as many historians still are, that such work all too often produces only pedestrian conclusions about what second-rate minds wrote about secondary issues. There were, of course, some exceptions: Hans Rosenberg, one of my teachers at Berkeley, took a strong interest in my first efforts to show that journalism history could make a significant contribution to social and political history. Martin Malia consented to direct my dissertation on right-wing newspapers in revolutionary Paris. And I well remember the inspiration I derived from Robert Darnton's presentation of his work on the publication of the Encyclopedie: he demonstrated that the social history of ideas could be not only significant but exciting. My fascination with newspapers, however, was already too strong for my well-meaning teachers to discourage it. When this interest first devel­ oped I cannot say: I only know that when my classmates were dreaming of growing up to be quarterbacks or millionaires, I was already deter­ mined to be a great press baron. I had an early interest in history , too, and the two interests came together when my father, trying to help a thirteen-year-old with a term paper project on the origins of World War I, took me to the dusty attic of the Claremont Colleges' Honnold Library and showed me the yellowed, crumbling volumes of the New York Times from 1 9 14. I found them irresistible. They brought home to me for the

Preface

[xi]

first time the fact that history is something that people make without knowing how it will come out, and I was fascinated by the difference between the medley of stories in the Times of 28 June 1 9 1 4 and the orderly arrangement of facts recorded in the history books. At about the same time my grandmother, Zelda Popkin, a novelist and sometime reporter, gave me a book that has had far greater impact on my thinking about newspapers than almost any of the weighty academic works I have read since. It was A. J. Liebling's The Press, a collection of essays about American journalism in the 1 940S and 1 950s. An unlikely work to interest an American teenager of the 1 960s, perhaps, but Lieb­ ling's sense of the complexity behind even the simplest newspaper story and his implicit message about the importance of honest journalism in a free society made an indelible impression on me. With such a background, it would have been natural for me to become a journalist myself. During my student days, I worked on several news­ papers. Reporting on the student riots of the 1 960s for the Berkeley Daily Californian, I learned firsthand the thrill of being in the center of the action and of seeing one's words in print the day after they were written. A great deal of what I learned from those experiences has gone into my subsequent academic work. But I also learned the limitations of journalism: the impossibility of ever thinking a subject through as fully and completely as one would like before setting one's thoughts down on paper, the constant pressure and tension of ajournalist's life, the inevita­ ble recognition that what one has written will be quickly forgotten. When my friends from the Daily Californian went off to start their apprenticeships at newspapers around the country, I went off to Paris and sublimated my passion for newspapers by burying myself in the old journals in the Bibl iotheque nationale. It was there, many years later, that I first read a copy of the prerevolutionary Gazette de Leyde. I recog­ nized in it the qualities that had fascinated me about newspapers from my childhood, and out of that encounter has come this book. The late A. J . Liebling, war reporter, boxing fan, gourmet, and anything but academic in his inclinations, might have scratched his head at the idea of such a project. But I like to hope that some of his spirited enthusiasm for the press has passed into these scholarly pages. In the course of my research and writing, I have incurred many obligations. I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the University of Kentucky Research Foundation for fellowship support in connection with this project. The Newberry Library in Chicago and the Max-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte in GOttingen provided supportive environments for the de-

[xii]

Preface

velopment of the ideas incorporated in this book. I am grateful to the staffs of many libraries and archives for their assistance, particularly the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago, the Leiden University Library, the Leiden Gemeentearchief, the Algemeen Rijksarchief of The Hague, the Rijksarchief en Zuid-Holland, the Koninklij k Bibli­ otheek, the Bibliotheque nationale, the Archives nationales, the New­ berry Library, the Library of Congress, the Archive de la Ministere des Affaires etrangeres, the Huntington Library, the Massachusetts Histor­ ical Society, the Folger Library, the Margaret I. King Library of the University of Kentucky, and the university libraries of Amsterdam, GOttingen, Wisconsin, and Indiana. I thank the University of California Press for permission to use some material from my contribution to Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin, eds., Press and Politics in Pre­ Revolutionary France, published in 1 987. For more than a decade, my friend Jack Censer has shared with me his enthusiasm and his extensive knowledge of the forgotten newspapers of the eighteenth century. His incisive critiques have saved me from many an error. Martin Welke of the Deutsches Zeitungsmuseum in Meers­ burg, West Germany, has been equally generous in allowing me to benefit from his unrivaled knowledge of the world of eighteenth-cen­ tury journalism. I am also grateful to Raymond Birn, Harold Ellis, and my colleague Mark Summers for their careful reading of the entire manuscript, and to Jan De Vries, Herbert Rowen, and Wayne te Brake for their advice to a historian of France adrift in the unfamiliar world of the Dutch Republic. My friend Judy Hansburg Woodward donated her time to give me my first information about the Luzac papers in Leiden, and Jan Van den Berg, Ivo Schoffer, Ernestine Van der Wall, Anita van Bokhoven of the Rijksarchief en Zuid-Holland, and Josien Huizinga of the Nederlands Persmuseum in Amsterdam have been helpful in locat­ ing other archival information on the subject. Keith Baker and Pierre Retat have given much valued encouragement and inspiration over the years. Robert Hodges and Andy McIntire made the index. Like the editor of the Gazette de Leyde, Jean Luzac, the central figure in my story, I am acutely aware of how difficult it is to obtain the truth about events far away and long ago: I can only say, as he did, that I have tried to keep my errors to a minimum and that it is I, not my friends, who must bear the responsibility for them. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in the text are my own. JEREMY D. POPKIN

Lexington, Kentucky

Abbreviations

AN AR BN DP Dumas KB LC LGA LGA-VH

Archives nationales (Paris) Algemeen Rijksarchief (The Hague) Bibliotheque nationale (Paris) Dumont-Pigalle papers Charles Dumas papers GazeUe de Leyde Koninklijk Bibliotheek (The Hague) Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.) Leiden Gemeentearchief Van Heukelom Family Archive

LUL

Leiden University Library

Luzac MAE

Luzac Family Archive Archives de la Ministere des

GL

[xiii]

Affaires etrangeres

(Paris)

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

News and European Culture in the Eighteenth Century

"Newspapers. I set this word down with a feeling of deep respect. Newspapers are one of the great instruments of culture through which we Europeans have become what we are."l So wrote the German jour­ nalist August Ludwig von Schl6zer, one of the founders of modern social science, in 1 804. He had just lived through the period of the French Revolution, when the newspaper press had become a political force impossible to ignore, but there is no doubt that Schl6zer meant his comment to apply as well to the prerevolutionary era, when he himself had been one of the continent's leading newsmen, editor of the cele­ brated German political magazine known as the Stats-Anzeigen. Indeed, long before 1789, the political newspaper had become one of the most

widespread of European cultural institutions, and its ubiquity was, as Schl6zer noted, one of the distinctive characteristics of European civili­ zation. No other major world civilization had developed any comparable ' medium for the dissemination of information, not only to government officials, but to a general public limited only by the ability to pay the modest price of a subscription or of admission to a coffeehouse or tavern where newspapers were available.2 I. August Ludwig von Schlozer. TMorie der Statistilt (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. 1 804). 78. 2. The Chinese may have been the first to have periodical newssheets, perhaps as early as the eighth or tenth centuries. but "these gazettes . . . should be considered a press service exclusively for the benefit of the official bureaucrats rather than of the people at large." Lin Yutang, A History ofthe Press and Public opinion in China (New York: Greenwood. 1 g68 rpt. ed.), 1 2. In the Ottoman Empire. printing in Turkish or Arabic was banned altogether until 1 727 and the single printing establishment created then was suppressed in 1 742, not to be reopened until 1 784. Bernard Lewis. The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1 96 1 ), 5 1 . News periodicals first appeared in Japan in the 1 860�,

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution By the second half of the eighteenth century, newspapers were printed in numerous European cities and towns that had no other major intellectual institutions: no universities, no academies, no book pub­ lishers. There were at least 93 newspapers published in German-speak­ ing Europe in 1 750, and 1 5 1 by 1 785. In Britain, 28 provincial cities had one or more local newspapers by 1 758, in addition to the dozen or more London papers that circulated nationally. In France, where the official Gazette de France had a monopoly on the publication of news, there were authorized reprints of that paper in 28 cities in 1 749, and 44 cities had a local newspaper by 1 784. Although newspapers were most numerous in western and central Europe, the institution had taken root even in those countries with the lowest literacy rates and the most autocratic govern­ ments. The first Spanish newspaper had appeared in 1 64 1 , the first Russian one in 1 702.3 Wherever Europeans settled in the world, they created newspapers modeled after those at home. There were 2 2 .in Britain's North American colonies by 1 760, and others appeared in the European colonies in the West Indies and in India.4 A map showing where newspapers were published would be impressive enough by the 1 770s, but newspapers were for sale in many other communities as well : indeed, there was probably no permanent European settlement any­ where in the world where printed newssheets did not eventually make their way. Newspapers also had a very wide readership, larger perhaps than that of any other genre of printed material except popular almanats and devotional works. Martin Welke, the leading expert on the German­ language newspaper press before 1 800, has estimated the total press run of all German-language newspapers in the eighteenth century at about 300,000 copies a week, with each copy reaching at least several readers.5 under the influence o f Western models; the extensive broadsheet and pamphlet press of the Tokugawa period had been largely apolitical and subject to strict censorship. Alben Altman, " 'Shimbunshi': The Early Meiji Adaptation of the Western-style Newspaper," in William G. Beasley, ed., Modem Japan: Aspects of History, Literature and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 975), 52, 56. 3. Paul-J. Guinard, IA presse espagnole de 1 737 Ii 1 79 1 (Paris: Centre de recherches hispaniques, 1 973), Ill; Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1 700-1 800 (Princeton, N .J.: Princeton University Press, 1 985). 4. Figures from Martin Welke, "Die l..egende vom 'unpolitischen Deutschen.' Zeitungs­ lesen im 1 8. Jahrhunden als Spiegel des politischen Interesses," Jahrbuch der Wittheit zu Bremen 25 ( 1 98 1 ) , 1 83; Roy Wiles, Freshest Advices: Earl, Provincial Newspapers in Eng16nd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1 965), 28; Gilles Feyel, lA "Gazette" en province Ii travers ses riimprtsSions, 16)1 - 1 752 (Amsterdam and Maarssen: APA-Holland University Press, 1 982), 20-22 ; Feyel, "La presse provinciale au XVllle siecle: Geographie d'un reseau," Revue historique, no. 552 ( 1 984), 353-74; Stephen Botein, '' 'Meer Mechanics' and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers," Perspectives in American History 9 ( 1 975), 1 50; Joachim von Schwarzkopf, "Von Kolonial­ Zeitungen," Allgemeiner Litttrarischer Anzeiger, 5 Mar. 1 80 1 , 337-42. 5. "Gemeinsame l..ektiire und fruhe Formen von Gruppenbildungen im 1 7. und 1 8 . Jahrhunden: Zeitungslesen i n Deutschland," i n Otto Dann, ed., Ltsegesellschaften und lnlrgerliche Emanzipation (Munich : Beck. 1 98 1 ), 30.

News and Culture in the Eighteenth Century The German states were undoubtedly the area with the largest news­ paper-reading audience, but in England, France, the Netherlands, and northern Italy, newspapers were available to most literate adults. The late-eighteenth-century newspaper was far from being a genuine mass medium-the persistence of adult illiteracy was enough to prevent it from achieving that status-but it was the one genre of printed material that reached an audience extending from the wealthy elites to a consid­ erable portion of the urban lower classes and even some of the peas­ antry. 6 Yet despite its broad audience, the news press of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has received little scholarly attention. Too dry and limited in content to interest intellectual historians, the newspapers of the early modern world have been considered to be too much a product of governing elites to interest researchers looking for evidence of popu­ lar mentalites. Historians of the English-speaking world, where formal precensorship was abolished at the end of the seventeenth century, have been more attentive to the news press than their colleagues concerned with other areas: the modern Anglo-American concept of press freedom has clear roots in the early modern period, and the importance of the press's role in both English domestic politics and the coming of the American Revolution is too obvious to have been overlooked.7 The history of newspapers in continental Europe has remained isolated from the mainstream of historical research, despite the publication of several recent multivolume national press histories;8 general historians of those countries have not seen the early modern press as a significant aspect of their culture or politics, and historians of the press have not viewed the newspapers published before 1 800 as important forerunners of the

nineteenth- and twentieth-century press.

The purpose of this book is to challenge these assumptions and to show that the continental European news press before the French Revo­ lution was indeed consequential both in the life of its own day and in the making of modern journalism. The journalism historian James W. Carey has justifiably asserted that the study of the newspapers of the past reveals "the story of the growth and transformation of the human mind as formed and expressed by one of the most significant forms in 6. For the most recent survey of literacy in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, see Harvey J . Graff, The Legacies ofLiteracy (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1 987). 1 73-259. 7. On the evolution of press freedom in Britain and the United States, see Leonard Levy, Emergence of a Free Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 985). On England, see Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1 987). 8. See particularly Claude Bellanger et aI., HiskJire ginirale de fa frresse fraru;aise, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1 969); and Valerio Castronovo et aI., La stampa italiana dal cinquecento all'otlocento (Bari: Laterza, 1 976), the first volume of the StOTia della stampa italiana. Margot Lindemann, Deutsche Presse bis 1 815 (Berlin: Colloquium, 1 969) is less satisfactory . ,

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution which the mind has conceived and expressed itself during the last three hundred years-the journalistic report."9 In exploring the largely ne­ glected world of the eighteenth-century news press, this book aims to add a new dimension to the understanding of politics in what historian R. R. Palmer has labeled "the age of the democratic revolution," and to show that the European newspapers of that era made a substantial contribution to defining the possibilities of journalism in modern so­ cieties. The typical eighteenth-century newspaper would probably repel the modern reader. When one opens a bound volume of such a publication , one confronts columns of crowded type, unrelieved by such modern journalistic inventions as headlines, subheads, and illustrations, re­ counting long-forgotten events in the style of a dull student research paper. But to contemporaries, these were passionately exciting reports of the world they lived in ; they reached for these texts more avidly than many of the other eighteenth-century works we now find more fascinat­ ing. The words on paper in newspapers were words that made a differ­ ence: they were an important aspect of eighteenth-century reality itself, affecting the functioning of its political institutions and the outcome of movements as momentous as the major revolutions of the time. They are, furthermore, valuable clues to some much-neglected aspects of eighteenth-century mentality, particularly to its sense of time and of historical change. This book will attempt to demonstrate, then, that our picture of the eighteenth-century world is as incomplete without an awareness of its newspapers as a picture of our own society would be without reference to its most important news sources. Newspapers mattered to their eighteenth-century readers because they were the best source of information about contemporary events. Unlike modern historians, who enjoy a vast array of other sources of information about this period, people of those times found it difficult to find out what was taking place beyond the range of their own eyes and ears. The dry and fragmentary news bulletins and the now nearly in­ comprehensible documents published in eighteenth-century newspap­ ers were the fruits of a major effort of information gathering in a world that lacked the resources for that task which modern men and women take for granted. It is true that eighteenth-century Europe had a fairly extensive system of communications. Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, regular postal systems had existed in most of western and central Eu­ rope. The quality of road networks varied greatly from region to region, but passable routes linked all parts of the continent during most of the 9· James W. Carey, "The Problem of Journalism History,"Joumalism History 1 ( 1 974), 2 7·

News and Culture in the Eighteenth Century year. Roads and postal systems permitted the dissemination of ideas and information, but they did not make the process automatic. Mail was expensive and slow, and only a few exceptional individuals, such as Voltaire and Horace Walpole, could afford the time and money to maintain a correspondence network that kept them informed regularly about major events all over the continent. Travel, too, was costly and time-consuming. A spontaneous journey to the scene of some interest­ ing event was an extraordinary undertaking, characteristic of such ad­ venturers of dubious reputation as the future French revolutionary Jacques-Pierre Brissot but not of those who had steady careers and responsibilities. It was the printing press that enabled European civilization to over­ come these barriers. But the printing press also had severe limitations. The wooden hand press, scarcely improved since Gutenberg's day, lacked the technical capacity to transmit anything like the volume of information that the power-driven printing machinery of the nine­ teenth century would be able to handle. For cultural and political rea­ sons, moreover, even the existing printing technology was not used to its full capacity. Governments did not systematically publicize their acts; in most states, the prevailing assumption was that the subjects had no right or need to know what their rulers were doing or even what the laws of their country were. When they did set out to broadcast a particular item of information to the entire literate population, rulers found themselves largely unprepared for the task. Thus the French government had to rely on a haphazard network of individual printers to circulate the edicts of convocation for the Estates-General of 1 789: there was no established machinery of public information to carry out the job. I O If it was difficult to obtain the latest government edicts and regula­ tions, it was equally difficult to obtain older ones. Vital public documents were often maintained only in manuscript form, in inaccessible archives. Information from other countries was also in short supply. Travelers arrived irregularly, and their qualifications as observers naturally varied tremendously. The eighteenth-century vogue for travel books is testi­ mony to the interest in information about distant places, but also to the difficulty in obtaining it. Even basic facts about major European coun­ tries remained in dispute. There were no reliable population figures: "We poor Germans still do not know how many of us there are," Schlo­ zer complained in one of the statistics-filled articles he published in his journal. I I There were few accurate economic statistics, and sometimes 1 0. There is extensive documentation on the difficulties of publicizing the instructions for the convocation of the Estates-General in AN. V(I). 549. e.g documents no. 3 1 and .•

449· 1 1.

Schl6zer. Briefwechsel meist historischen und politischen Inhalts v. 3. no. 13. 1 8n. (Jan. 1778).

[6]

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

no accepted data on the sizes of long-established territories. Compared with the world that came into existence in the nineteenth century, held together by the telegraph and the railroad, and kept informed by daily newspapers capable of transmitting far more information than their forerunners, the eighteenth century lived in a perpetual fog of uncer­ tainty about distant events. The periodical newspaper was the early modern European world's most ambitious attempt to remedy this situation. The newspaper was part of that broad drive for systematic, rational control over the environ­ ment which has characterized European civilization since the Renais­ sance. The printing press made the newspaper possible; dependable postal systems made it practical. The regular, periodic transmission of messages meant one could produce a regular printed version of those messages, and improved systems of mail and transport made it possible to market such printed products widely enough to make them profit­ able. A regular, comprehensive survey of major world events, previously available only to rulers via their diplomatic networks and to businessmen as wealthy as the Fuggers, now became available to a much broader public. The progress of the newspaper closely paralleled that of the private timepiece, as described in David Landes's Revolution in Time: 12 both served to orient the actions of individuals in time, the personal watch by allowing users to time and control their own activities, the newspaper by giving them a sense of the movement of the wider world. Like the pocket watch, the newspaper was perfected and improved throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but without any revolutionary technological transformation. There was a steady move­ ment toward more frequent publication and toward the delivery of a larger total amount of content in a given period. Newspaper publishers achieved these gains by increasing the size of the paper used, employing smaller type, and printing more pages. Most of the early seventeenth­ century papers appeared at most once a week; by the end of the century, 64 percent of German newspapers were issued biweekly and an addi­ tional 7 percent had three or more issues per week. 13 This increase in the information-carrying capacity of individual newspapers paralleled a steady growth in the number of papers throughout the period. What these newspapers had to offer was a skeletal narrative of major public events: wars, diplomatic negotiations, and major political occur­ rences within states, ranging from royal edicts to constitutional conflicts. These newspaper accounts were soon superseded even in their own day 12. David Landes, Revolution in Time (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1983). 1 3. Jiirgen Wilke. Nachrichtenauswahl und Medienrealitiit in vierJahrhunderten (Berlin: De Gruyter. 1 984), 4°.

News and Culture in the Eighteenth Century by other forms of narrative and polemic, from ephemeral pamphlets to the "histories" of significant happenings which writers of the time pro­ duced as speedily as the journalistic historians of today. But the very process by which newspaper accounts were replaced by other forms of journalistic literature points to the unique characteristics of the news­ paper text which made it so important in its own time : its timeliness and its regular, predictable publication. Otto Groth, the leading student of the genre, has defined periodic publication as one of the essential attributes of all newspapers. l 4 By providing a regular account of events and arriving at a predictable time, the newspaper sets itself off from other kinds of journalism such as pamphlets and books. Periodicity allows readers to anticipate the arrival of their newspaper and structures their reactions to the changes in the world its text reports. The newspaper's periodicity was also a mechanism for structuring the flow of time, which thus became broken into predict­ able segments. Within those segments, events, no matter how unset­ tling, would be promptly and dependably named, recorded, and put into the comforting framework of journalistic stereotypes. What was new and threatening in the world would thus be made more manage­ able. Another specific feature of newspapers is timeliness. As Groth puts it, the purpose of the newspaper is to print up-to-date information: "The means by which newspapers first win over and then maintain their audience . . . is the satisfaction of a common desire for what is new." 1 5 Although the newspaper's account of events could soon be supplanted by accounts in other media, its special claim was that it gave the first report. The arrival of the newspaper set off the first reactions to the news it contained, whether idle conversations among its readers or concrete actions, ranging from changes in the bids on stock exchanges to outbreaks of popular violence. The newspaper was the first point of contact between its readers and new events occurring at a distance from them. To attempt to describe and analyze the content of all the surviving European newspapers of the eighteenth century would be a monumen­ tal undertaking. My approach is rather to focus on one particular pub­ lication, a newspaper that contemporaries recognized as the finest ex­ emplar of the genre, and to examine its history during the years of its greatest glory, just before the French Revolution. We can then follow its struggle to survive in the new political climate that the Revolution created. The years running from just after 1 770 to just before 1 800 were crucial : the American and French Revolutions, the diplomatic earth14. Otto Groth, 15. Ibid., I:50.

Die Ztitung (Mannheim: Bensheimer, 1928), 1:22.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

[8]

quake resulting in the partitions of Poland and rise of the great powers who would dominate European affairs until the First World War, and domestic political crises in almost every country occurred in this period. The development of modern journalism coincided with these events. In the revolutionary upheavals of the time, the press became not only a medium for the communication of information but also a force in shap­ ing public opinion. The achievements and limitations of Europe's most respected newspaper in covering dramatic news events and coping with the changing nature ofjournalism illustrate most facets of the function­ ing of the eighteenth-century news press as a whole. The successes and failures of this one publication show how the news system of the Euro­ pean old regime functioned and what happened when that world was suddenly transformed. Happily, we can follow the fortunes of this news­ paper during these dramatic years through a range of archival materials more extensive than any yet discovered for other newspapers before the modern era. The method I follow is to analyze this newspaper as a coherent text, that is, as a representation of the world in words, chosen and arranged in accordance with certain specific rules. To be sure, such a text can be fully understood only with reference to a number of contexts that framed it. I argue that this particular newspaper fully qualifies as one of those complex texts for which , as Dominick LaCapra has written, "one has [a] set of interacting contexts whose relations to one another are variable and problematic and whose relation to the text being investigated raises difficult issues of interpretation."16 Among the key contexts that condi­ tioned this eighteenth-century newspaper were the conscious and un­ conscious intentions of its editor, the traditions of journalistic discourse within which it operated, the rival publications against which it com­ peted, and the nature of the European society in which it circulated. The

Gazette de Leyde

Among the several hundred news publications available to European readers in the 1 770S and 1 780s, one title stood out. Thomas Jefferson called it simply "the best in Europe" and "the only one in Europe worth reading." 17 According to a French source, Louis XVI "respected it, and 1 6 . Dominick LaCapra."Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts." in LaCap­ ra and Steven 1.. Kaplan.eds Modern European Intellectual History (Ithaca.N .Y.: Cornell University Press. 1 982). 57. 1 7. Jefferson to John Jay. 17 June 1 785.and Jefferson to C. F. Dumas.31 July 1 788.in J ulian Boyd.ed The Papers of ThomasJefferson (Princeton.N .J.: Princeton University Press. 1 950-).8:2 26. 1 3:438-39. .•

.•

News and Culture in the Eighteenth Century

[9]

it was said to be the only one he read."18 Joachim von Schwarzkopf, a German diplomat who wrote the first international survey of the news­ paper press in the 1 790s, gave the paper a detailed encomium: "By water and land it was sent to the most distant countries; it was read with the same intense interest at the gates of the Seraglio and on the banks of the Ganges, and copied from by almost all other newspaper editors . . . . In exactitude on diplomatic matters, in completeness and impartiality, and in conciseness and elegance of expression , it was unmatched by any other newspaper. " 19 The publication to which Jefferson and Schwarzkopf referred bore the unwieldy title of Nouvelles extraordinaires de Divers Endroits, but it was universally referred to simply as the Gazette de Leyde. One of several gazettes published in the Netherlands but printed in French , it had appeared continuously since 1 677, but it acquired its almost unques­ tioned position as Europe's newspaper of record only in the latter half of the eighteenth century, first under the ownership of Etienne Luzac, editor and publisher from 1 739 to the early I 770s, and then even more strikingly under his nephew Jean Luzac, from 1 772 until 1 798. During this period, the Gazette de Leyde clearly outdid all other journals in providing a detailed chronicle of ongoing political events in Europe as a whole and within the major countries of the continent. Even when the French Revolution had utterly transformed Europe's journalistic land­ scape, a set of back volumes of the Gazette de Leyde remained indispens­ able for those who wanted a comprehensive record of the history of their own times. No less a personage than Louis Bonaparte, installed by his brother as king of the Netherlands after 1 806, contacted the paper's owner in quest of such a collection. 2 0 The Gazette de Leyde in the years of Jean Luzac's editorsh ip was the culmination of a long history of French-language news reporting in the Netherlands.2 1 Indeed, the earliest known gazette published in the 1 8. [Pidansat de Mairobert, attrib. ] , Mimoires secrets pour servir a l'histoire de La ripublique des leUres en France, depuis MDCCLXIIjusqu'a nos jours (London: John Adamson. 1777-89), 28: 1 66 (8 Mar. 1 785). 1 9. ALlgemeiner Literaruche Am:eiger, 23 Sept. 1 800. On Schwarzkoprs life and his pi­ oneering comparative survey of world newspapers, see Otto Groth, Geschichte der deutschen ZeitungswissenschaJt (Munich: Weinmayer. 1 948), 68-8 1 . Schwarzkopf published the re­ sults of his country-by-country survey in a series of articles in the Allgemeiner Literarische Anuiger in 1 800- 1 80 1 . 20. Letter signed Briatte, to Etienne Luzac, 1 3 April 1 809, i n LGA-VH, Z( 2), no. 1 2 1. 2 1 . The most comprehensive existing study of the Dutch French-language gazettes as a whole is Eugene Hatin, Les gauttes de Hollande et la presse clandestine aux XVlle e/ XVllle siecles (Paris: Pincebourde, 1 865). The publication of this work inspired a nineteenth­ century Dutch scholar, Willem Pieter Sautijn Kluit, to compile a series of monographs on the Dutch papers based on scrupulous archival research but consisting of little more than excerpts of the documents he found. A bibliography of his numerous articles is in Docu-

[ 1 0]

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French language, the Courant d'[talie et d'Almaigne, appeared in Amster­ dam in 1 620, eleven years before the founding of the first newspaper on French soil. 22 In the first half of the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was the only source of French-language gazettes in the Netherlands, but a similar paper may have appeared in Leiden in the 1 660s, since the city issued a ban against such publications in 1 669.23 This initial French gazette does not seem to have been the direct ancestor of Luzac's paper, however. The history of the Gazette de Leyde began in 1 677, when Jean Alexandre de la Font, a French Huguenot, began to publish a newssheet under the title of Traduction libre des Gazettesjl4mandes et autres. 2 4 The title indicated that the paper began as a by-product of the flourishing Dutch­ language news industry, like the Amsterdam Courant d'[talie et d'Al­ maigne a half-century earlier. By 1 679, however, the paper had adopted a new title that suggested a bid to be taken seriously as a news source in its own right: Nouvelles extraordinaires de Divers Endroits.25 This formula, typical of the seventeenth-century European press, remained the pa­ per's official name until 1 798, long after most other European news­ papers had gone over to shorter titles ; in this, as in many other respects, the Leiden paper remained rooted in the journalistic conventions devel­ oped in the late seventeenth century. The Gazette de Leyde had come on the scene at an auspicious moment: the increasing stream of French Huguenot refugees arriving in the Netherlands guaranteed an easily accessible audience, and the wars of Louis XIV guaranteed a steady flow of news to print. Repeated bans against the publication of such gazettes issued by the the Estates of Holland had no effect.26 In the 1 680s and 1 6905, the GazeUe de Leyde mentatieblad WerkgToep Achtliende Eeuw, no. 39 (May 1 978), 1 5-22, and a shott summary of his main points is in Graham C. Gibbs, ''The Role of the Dutch Republic as the Intellectual Entrep6t of Europe in the 1 7th and 1 8th centuries," in Bijdragm en MedetUlingen betrejJende de Geschiedenis den Nederlanden 86 ( 1 97 1 ), 323-49. The most complete listing of these and similar papers published elsewhere in Europe is in Jerzy Lojek, "Gazettes intemationales de langue franytise dans Ia seconde moitie du XVIIIe siecle," in Modeles et moyens de la rejlexUm politique au XVllIe sitcle (lille: Presses universitaires de lille, 1 977), 1 : 36g-82. 22. The paper was a translation of the Dutch-language Courante u,t lll.llien en Duytslandt, founded in 1 6 1 8. Four numbers of the Courant d'lto.lie tit d'Almaigne from 1 620-2 1 are reproduced in Folke Dahl, Dutch Corantos 1 618-1 650 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1 946). 23. Willem Pieter Sautijn Kluit, "Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Dagbladpers tot 1 8 1 3," in Bijdragen tot de Gtschiedenis van den Ntderlandschen Botlchandel7 ( 1 8gS), 1 14. 24. Willem P. Sautijn KI':lit. "De Fransche Leidsche Courant," in Handelingen en Mtde­ detlingen van de Maatschaf1J1ij der Nederlandsche Letterlcunde te Leiden, ( 1 86g-70), 3- 1 3. An early number of this publication, dated 3 1 August 1 677, is reproduced in W. P. van Stockum, La librairie, l'imprimtrit tt la presst en Hollande a travers quatrt sitcles (The Hague: Mouton, 1 9 1 0), 82-84. Publication apparently had begun in March 1 677. 25. The issue for 1 6 November 1 679, in the Bibliotheque Mazarine (Paris), is the earliest known copy with the new title. 26. J . T. Bodel Nyenhuis, De Wetgevmg op de drokpers en botlchandel in de Nederlanden tot in het begin van de 19teeuw (Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1 892). 1 35-44, lists edicts against the

News and Culture in the Eighteenth Century

[1 1]

seems to have enjoyed success. Its four-page biweekly issues were re­ issued in several counterfeit editions, a sure sign of a good journalistic reputation.27 Despite the ongoing wars between France and the Nether­ lands, the paper circulated in Louis XIV's kingdom ; it was publicly advertised in Grenoble in 1 697-98.2 8 Jean Alexandre de la Font had died in 1 685. The paper evidently was taken over by his son, Anthony de la Font, born, like his father, in Languedoc; they were among the many Huguenot refugees who made a new life in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Little evidence exists about the condition of the paper in the early eighteenth century, other than the Leiden city fathers' renewal of its privilege in 1 706.29 It continued to print news that was kept out of the domestic press in the major European states: in 1 7 16, it published secret summaries of the proceedings against an English peer implicated in the Jacobite rebellion of 1 7 1 5.30 In 1 723, the de la Fonts took an action that determined the history of the paper for the rest of the century: they engaged the teenaged son of another Huguenot refugee, one Etienne Luzac, to assist in the editing of their journal.3 l Anthony de la Font continued to be listed as publisher until his death in 1 738. During the 1 720S and 1 730s, the paper remained important enough for several foreign governments to lodge protests with the Dutch government about its reports, but these complaints seem to have had no serious consequences.32 publication of French-language papers in the province of Holland in 1 679, 1 686, and 1 6g 1 . The latter measure was later extended to cover all Dutch provinces. 27. Given the scarcity of issues from this period, it is not easy to distinguish counterfeit from genuine copies. The Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, has several issues from 1 690 bearing an imprint at the bottom of p. 4 reading "A LElDE Chez De la Font," with printed area measuring 1 8.8 cm by u.S cm and catchwords at the bottom of the right-hand columns on pp. 1-3. If this edition is authentic, then de la Font had sligh tly altered the paper's format by 1 6gB, when the series of copies now in the Folger Library in Washington, D.C. , were produced. Their imprint reads "Leide, Chez de La Font, Avec privilege des Etats de Hollande et de West-Frise." The printed area measures 1 9.4 cm by 1 1 .6 cm, and there are no catchwords. The high quality of the printing and the use of the minute brevin- or petit texU letters-a Dutch printing specialty-make it probable that these copies represent the authentic edition. The Folger and Lilly libraries both possess a few numbers of a version of the paper that has no imprint and whose printed area measures 1 8 cm by IS cm, the Folger's numbers dating from 1 687 and the Lilly's from 1 688. These are more crudely printed and use the slightly larger type size known as petit romain in France. They probably represent an unauthorized reprint of the paper. 28. Feyel, La "GautU" en fJrovinu, 1 50 . 29. Kluit, "Fransche Leidsche Courant," 1 9. 30. An English political figure, John Oldmixon, was accused of having tried to arrange for an English translation of the documents printed in French in the newspaper. Jeremy Black and Pat Rogers, "Oldmixon Incurs 'The Displeasure of the Most Honourable House of Peers,' '' in Factotum (Newsletter of the Eighteenth-Century Shon Title Catalogue), no. 24 (Aug. IgB7), 4. 3 1 . Kluit, "Fransche Leidsche Courant," 2 1 . 32. Protest letters i n LGA-VH , Z( I ) , include documents no. 7 (complaint from Hanau, 1 737), and no. 20 (complaint from Poland, 1 74 1 ).

[ 1 2]

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

The event that cleared the way for the Gazette de Leyde's eventual rise to the status of Europe's most trusted newspaper occurred in 1 738, when Anthony de la Font died. Ownership of the paper, whose privilege had just been renewed in 1 736,33 passed to his daughter Aletta Maria and her husband Johannes de Graaff, a lawyer in The Hague. The pair had no interest in running a newspaper themselves; after complex negotia­ tions with several would-be purchasers, they finally made a contract with Etienne Luzac, under which he agreed to take over the enterprise and to pay the de Graaffs a yearly sum of 1 ,500 gulden, of which 300 repre­ sented the yearly payment owed to the city of Leiden for the paper's privilege.34 From 1 738 onward, the paper bore the imprint "A Leide, par Etienne Luzac." The actual printing of the paper was handled by Etienne Luzac's brother Jean Luzac, who had been admitted to the city's printers' guild in December 1 735.35 Little is known about the personalities of Etienne Luzac or his brother. Both were sons of the second marriage of one Jean Luzac, a Huguenot refugee originally from Bergerac in the Dordogne, who settled in Fran­ eker in the Dutch province of Friesland, and whose other descendants included the writer, bookseller, and polemicist Elie Luzac, known for his works against French materialism. 36 John Adams, American representa­ tive in the Netherlands during the early 1 780s, remembered them as two "venerable sages" who "entertained me with the controversies . . . be­ tween the Maritime Provinces and the Inland." Clearly they were well versed in the details of Dutch politics. 37 Etienne, the younger of the two brothers who took over the Gazette de Leyde, left Franeker at an early age and, as we have seen, joined the editorial staff of de la Font's paper in 1 7 2 3 , when he was just seventeen. The rest of his life seems to have been devoted almost exclusively to the paper. He took great pride in his high journalistic principles, returning a proffered gratuity to one overzealous agent for a foreign government with a letter stating that "in order to preserve my quality as a true historian, I accept neither payments nor pensions, so that if I happen to 33. Ibid . , no. 6. 34. Contract in ibid., no. 1 1 . 35. LGA, Gildenboek 83, vol. 3, p. 36. 36. Elie Luzac was a descendant of the elder Jean Luzac's first marriage, and thus a half­ cousin of Etienne and Jean Luzac. See the family tree in L. Knappert, "Een gedenksteen voor Professor Jean Luzac," in Leidse Jaarbookje 7 ( 1 9 1 0), 1 1 2- 2 2 . 37. Adams t o F. A. Van der Kemp, n . d . b u t 1 807, cited i n Helen Lincklaen Fairchild, ed. , Francis Adrian va n der Kemp, 1 75 2 - 1 829. A n Autobiography (New York: Putnam, 1 903), 68n. Adams mentions that the elder Luzacs discussed "Addresses to the Prince of Orange in their youth," which suggests the possibility that the Luzac brothers had participated in the radical Doelisten movement which sought to use the restoration of the H ouse of Orange as an opportunity to reform the oligarchical town government of l..eiden in 1 748. On the Leiden Doelisten, see Maarten Prak, Gezeten Burgers.De Elite in een Hollandse Stad. Leiden 1 700- 1 780 (The H ague: Hollandse H istorische Reeks. 1 985), 94.

News and Culture in the Eighteenth Century err, I do so in good faith."38 He never married, but he acted as a second father to the four children of his brother Jean ; on his death, his niece Emilie recalled his "entirely admirable and lovable character."39 His personal papers include drafts of some poems directed against the Orangist supporters of the stadholder, the principal magistrate in the complex Dutch government, but he does not seem to have been par­ ticularly active in Leiden politics. At his death in 1 787, he left a respect­ able inheritance of 4 1 ,0 1 0 gulden to his heirs, including half-ownership of a house on the fashionable Steenschuur which he had shared with his brother.40 Even less is known about his brother Jean, father of the younger Jean Luzac who edited the Gazette de Leyde after 1 77 2 ..The elder Jean Luzac lived from 1 702 to 1 783 and was active as a printer and bookseller, but his main business seems to have been the publication of the Gazette de Leyde. It paid him well: at the time of his death, he had accumulated an estate of 64,000 gulden.4 1 But there is nothing to indi­ cate that he ever had any influence on the contents of the newspaper, the legal control of which was entirely in his brother's hands. When Etienne Luzac took over the direction of the Gazette de Leyde, nothing particularly distinguished its news coverage. Its news from France was hardly more exciting than that published in the Gazette de France. But the new publisher soon altered that situation. The paper's French coverage underwent a startling change by the early 1 750s, with the eruption in France of a lengthy dispute over the Catholic hierarchy's attempt to suppress Jansenist dissent by refusing last rites to individuals who could not prove that they had abjured the propositions condemned in the famous papal bull Unigenitus. Together with the other gazettes de Hollande, the Gazette de Leyde became a main vehicle for the French law courts, the parlements, in their noisy campaign against these refusals of sacraments. French officials quite plainly regarded this avalanche of documentation about their domestic problems as a new departure in the behavior of the Dutch papers. Chretien Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the friend of the philosophes who was then directeur-giniral de La librairie, referred to it as "this newly introduced practice of receiving false or exaggerated documents from all the ill-intentioned people in the king­ dom and spreading them all over Europe."42 Although several of the foreign-based French-language papers participated in this campaign, 38. Etienne Luzac to Charles Bressanelli, representative of King Stanislas-August of Poland in Amsterdam, 3 1 Jan. 1 770, in LGA-VH, P(4). 39. Emilie Luzac to Jean Luzac, 30 Jan. 1 787, in LUL, Luzac, carton 29. 40. Documents in LGA-VH, P(4). In a pattern characteristic of wealthy Leiden residents of the period, his fortune consisted almost entirely of bonds issued by various Dutch and foreign governments. See Prak, Geuten Burgers, 1 3 1 . 4 1 . LGA-VH, P(8), documentation of division of estate, 1 0 Aug. 1 783. 42. "Memoire sur la gazette d'Hollande donne It M. le Chancelier au mois de mars," n.d. but 1 759, in BN, Anisson-Duperron collection, Ms. fro 2 2 1 34, ff. 227-3 1 .

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution the Gazette de Leyde distinguished itself by the amount of space it devoted to documents such as the remonstrances issued by the parlements and by its soft-spoken but unmistakable support for the parlementary and Jan­ senist cause. A recent analysis of the paper's role in the refusal-of­ sacraments controvery has shown that reports and reprinted documents on this one issue often filled more than half the paper's news space in the mid- 1 750s.43 Alone among the foreign papers, the Gazette de Leyde ex­ plicitly linked Robert-Franc;ois Damiens's attempt to assassinate Louis XV in 1 757 to the king's bungling efforts to settle the controversy. At a moment when even the foreign-based papers had been enlisted to affirm the French people's love of their king, only Etienne Luzac'sjournal came forward, in Pierre Retat's words, "to contest the unanimity and the filial devotion that the press and all the texts about the event exalted, to dissipate the official pretenses and illusions, and to stress the actual conditions, troubling and unhealthy, under which the trial took place."44 Etienne Luzac's success in stamping the paper with a pronounced character was due in part to his having achieved firm personal control over it. In 1 75 1 , the privilege he had purchased from de la Font's heirs expired, and he was able to obtain a new authorization from the city fathers in his own name, at the higher price of 600 gulden a year. The greatly increased royalty of 3,000 gulden a year that Luzac agreed to pay to the city when he obtained a subsequent renewal in 1 766 is eloquent testimony to the paper's success under his direction.45 Luzac had clear authority to proceed as he chose, and it may well be that the paper's more partisan coverage of French affairs starting in 1 752 was connected with the editor's confidence that the paper was now his property. The refusal-of-sacraments controversy was only the first of a long series of French domestic issues that the GazeUe de Leyde reported much more fully than any native French publication. The Seven Years' War, which lasted from 1 756 to 1 763, also gave the paper ample material. The war's end may have caused some dip in circulation, but there was still no lack of news. Etienne Luzac filled his columns with stories about English political and social disputes, the beginnings of agitation in the American colonies, troubles in Poland and Sweden, and the never­ ending succession of domestic political crises in Louis XV's France. The paper had found its niche in the European press market. At a time when many of its older competitors were floundering under incom­ petent editors, the Gautte de Leyde established itself as a sober, depend43. Carroll Joynes, "The Gautte de Leyde: The Opposition Press and French Politics, 1 750- 1 757," in Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin, 005., Press and Politics in Pre­ Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of Cali fomia Press, 1 987), 1 33-69. 44. Pierre Retat, in Pierre Retat, ed. , L'atttntat de Damiens (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1 979), 88. 45. Copies of the privileges are in LGA-VH , Z( I ), no. 31 ( 1 75 1 ) and 32 ( 1 766).

News and Culture in the Eighteenth Century able source of information. It firmly eschewed spicy anecdotes, which the manuscript newsletters retailed and in which some of its competitors such as the Gazette d'Utrecht dabbled. The Gazette de Leyde also rejected humble subservience to governments in whose territories it hoped to

circulate and calmly pursued its course of documenting public criticism of established governments without necessarily endorsing it. Despite its quiet tone, the Gazette de Leyde made no effort to conceal its sympathy with the French parlements' long-drawn-out resistance to Louis XV's ministers' efforts to enforce extensive claims for royal authority. It pub­ licized domestic and colonial complaints about George Il l's policies in the 1 760s, but expressed strong dislike for John Wilkes's agitation for radical reforms in England. Luzac was similarly unsympathetic with radical protest in Geneva in the late 1 760s. By the time the young Jean Luzac joined his uncle in editing the paper in 1 77 2 , its format, its news policies, and its editorial tone had been firmly set for a decade and a half.

Jean Luzac and the Gazette de Leyde It was under the editorship of Jean Luzac that the Gazette de Leyde obtained a genuinely unique position in the world of the European press. This success owed something to the younger man's distinctive personal qualities, which won him the friendship of such personalities of the revolutionary era as John Adams and Filippo Mazzei, but it was due more to the continuation of editorial policies laid down by Etienne Luzac and to the changing circumstances in Europe. The period of Etienne Luzac's full control over the paper, 1 75 1 to 1 77 2 , had been a time of relative calm in European politics. The Seven Years' War had

been a major news story, of course, but it had not led to revolutionary upheavals in any of the countries involved. French politics had gener­ ated much sound and fury, but no decisive explosion. The Netherlands themselves, after the Orangist restoration in 1 747, had enjoyed two decades of domestic tranquillity. Jean Luzac's tenure as editor, 1 772 to 1 798, saw far more dramatic events: the partitions of Poland, the Ameri­ can Revolution, the Dutch Patriot movement, and finally the French Revolution and the wars resulting from it. No doubt Etienne Luzac possessed the journalistic skills to have profited from public interest in these events, but he was an old man by 1 77 2 , and he had been going through the routine of editing the paper twice a week for forty-nine years. He was to live until 1 787, but the paper was fortunate to be in younger, more vigorous hands when the drama of the age of revolutions opened. Jean Luzac, on the other hand, benefited from the reputation his uncle had earned for the paper : it gave him a competitive edge in

[ 1 6]

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

obtaining the news he needed to make it the best-informed journal in Europe. The young man who returned to his native Leiden in 1 77 2 to assist his elderly uncle looks out at us in two surviving portraits. A drawing in chalk by A. Delfos, the basis for the Lucas Portman engraving of Luzac reproduced in this book, shows a round-faced man with fine features and lively eyes, who looks more French than Dutch.46 A posthumous medallion for Luzac's monument in the Pieterskerk in Leiden is recog­ nizably the same man, but here the eyes gaze into the distance and an unseen breeze ruffles the subject'S hair, giving Luzac a touch of the romantic spirit, which had arisen by the Napoleonic period. Neither portrayal really suggests the personality that emerges from the Gazette de Leyde's editor's letters or from the recollections of those who knew him. Luzac may have favored his French ancestors in physical appearance, but he was every inch a sober, serious Dutchman, a "genuine Batave," as one American friend called him, rather than a lively, animated Latin.47 Nor was he the romantic hero his friends had commissioned to be sculpted for his funerary monument: his was a life of principles and duties, always concerned with issues close at hand, not with distant horizons. Born in 1 746, Luzac belonged to the third generation of his Hugue­ not family to live on Dutch soil. By the time of his birth, the descendants of the Huguenot refugees had given up any hope of returning to France and had accepted the permanence of their situation in the Republic. Jean Luzac's father, settled in Leiden as a printer, married a native Dutchwoman, Anna Valckenaer, the daughter of a schoolteacher. Dutch was the younger Jean Luzac's first language; it was the language in which he carried on most of his family correspondence all his life. He remained linked to the Huguenot tradition through his religious affilia­ tion : Jean Luzac was a member of Leiden's French (Waalse) Calvinist congregation.48 The characterizations of his personality offered by both friends and enemies strongly suggest that he had inherited the energy and the self-righteousness so often associated with the Calvinist faith. 46. The Delfos drawing is reproduced in Ivo Schaffer, "Een Leids Hoogleraar in politieke moeilijkheden. Het ontslag van Johan Luzac in 1 796," in J. F. Heijbroek, A. Lammers, and A. P. G. Jos van der Linde, eds. , Gun Schepsel Wordt Vergeten (Amsterdam and Zutphen: Trouw, 1 985), 62. 47. William Vans Murray, diary entry , 1 9 Oct. 1 798, in LC, William Vans Murray pa s i.uzac's friend, the nineteenth-century Dutch philologist Matthias Siegenbeek, maintained that Jean Luzac was a pious Christian all his life, but there is no trace of more than a conventional adherence to the Reformed church in any of Luzac's surviving papers. Siegenbeek's claim probably reflects the more intense religiosity of the nineteenth-century Netherlands. Willem Bilderdijk and Matthijs Siegenbeek, LeiJens Ramp (Amsterdam : Al­ lart and Ruis, 1 838), 1 54.

.rs�

News and Culture in the Eighteenth Century

[ 1 7]

Jean Luzac, 1 747- 1 807. Engraving by Lucas Portman. Courtesy of Prof. J . W. Schulte Nordholt.

Both his strong sense of responsibility and a certain moral pessimism in his outlook were also strengthened when he inherited a heavy load of family obligations after the death of his mother while he was still in his teens. The stiff and formal tone of the Gazette de Leyde and its rigid devotion to principles, though determined to some extent by journalistic conventions, undoubtedly mirrored aspects of Luzac's personality. Luzac's social position in Dutch society and his other professional activities also affected his newspaper. Paradoxically, this man, who came closer than any other newsman of the period to embodying the qualities considered ideal in a journalist of his era, was not at all typical of the newspapermen of his time. He was able to live up to the professed ideals

[ 1 8]

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

of his trade in many ways only because he was not fully a professional: it was his firm place in Dutch society, his multiple sources of income, and his personal political involvements that enabled him to eschew the com­ promises other gazetteers had to make to succeed. His contemporaries among the editors of French-language international gazettes were usu­ ally adventurers who turned to journalism, like Charles Theveneau de Morande, who had been trained as a French lawyer but had to start a new life in London when he was forced to flee France because of various scrapes with the authorities, or Jean Manzon, Piedmontese by origin, who ended up settling in Prussian territory.49 Cut off from their native milieu, such emigres were totally dependent on their journalistic enter­ prises and had to purchase the political favors that gave them access to information and opportunities to circulate their papers. Jean Luzac's situation was completely different. He was deeply rooted in his Dutch environment; indeed, he was even more provincial than most educated Dutchmen of his day. Except for the four years imme­ diately following his university studies, when he moved to The Hague, about ten miles away, Luzac spent his entire life in his native Leiden. He had undoubtedly traveled to some of the other major Dutch cities, but the only documented occasion on which he left the Netherlands was a brief trip to Brussels in 1 798, after he had been forced to give up his editorial control of the paper.50 Luzac's assimilated Huguenot family was able to provide him with the qualifications to ascend almost as high in Leiden society as its complex structure allowed. Unlike the members of such non-Calvinist religious minorities as the Catholics and the Bap­ tists, the members of the Huguenot congregations were not subject to any religious barriers: the only positions closed to them were those monopolized by the oligarchy of regent families that dominated the city's political system. Luzac's father Jean and his uncle Etienne had not taken full advantage of the opportunities offered by assimilation. Both had devoted themselves to the French-language newspaper, a typical enterprise for immigrants whose linguistic abilities gave them an edge in this particular field.5 1 The members of the next generation. such as the younger Jean Luzac, had a much broader involvement with Dutch society and greater aspirations. According to one of their employees, the elder Jean Luzac had been "a man without vanity, without ostentation, 49. Paul Robiquet, Thiveneau de Morande (Paris: Quantin, 1 882); Franc;ois Moureau, "Jean Manzon," in Jean Sgard, ed. , Dictionnaire des journalistes. Supplement I (Grenoble: Centre d'Etudes des Sensibilites, 1 980) , 1 07- 1 0. 50. Luzac to [Baudus) , n.d. but probably 1 800, in LUL, Luzac, carton 28, no. 54. 5 1 . Hans Bots and Rene Bastiaanse, "Die Huguenotten und die niederlandischen Generalstaaten," in Rudolf von Thadden and Michelle Magdeleine, eds., Die Huguenotten (Munich : Beck. 1 985), 68-70.

News and Culture in the Eighteenth Century without pretentions," but the younger Luzacs, despite being raised "in their father's messy shop," had "all the self-importance of parvenus."52 The urban community that shaped so much of Jean Luzac's life was a virtually autonomous city-republic. Since the Dutch revolt against Spain, Leiden, like the other Dutch cities, had been governed by its own city council, which chose the city's representatives to the Estates of the province of Holland, which in turn sent deputies to the national States­ General in The Hague. The provincial assembly and the States-General, chosen mostly by the town councils, had very limited powers over the city governments, and Luzac grew up in a political environment that fostered devotion to traditional local institutions. Those institutions were formally republican, shaped by the long European tradition of municipal self-government and the distrust of hereditary executive au­ thority that has come to be known as civic humanism.53 The civic­ humanist paradigm stressed the value of political liberty and made sovereignty in the city an emanation from the people, but it did not require representative democracy. It pointed toward the establishment of a mixed government dominated by an aristocracy made up of the "best citizens," what the French-born Dutch republican publicist and sometime associate of Luzac, Antoine-Marie Cerisier, described as "a popular aristocracy" in which "the magistrates select themselves, but no native of the country is excluded because of his birth. "54 Even more than his identification with his Dutch homeland and his Calvinist religious affiliations, Jean Luzac was shaped by this municipal republicanism. Jean Luzac was not brought up with ajournalistic career in mind. He received the rather old-fashioned humanistic education favored by the Dutch upper classes at the Leiden Latin school. He had a gift for languages, which was stimulated by his maternal uncle Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer, professor at Leiden University and one of the most distin­ guished classicists of his day. Luzac learned French by the age of seven and Latin soon after; the earliest of his surviving letters, written when he was fourteen, is a Latin missive. 55 This background seemed to destine 52. AR, DP, note in cart011 59, "Contre Luzac." 53. On the ideological origins of the civic-humanist tradition in early modem Europe, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N .J . : Princeton University Press, 1 975), esp. 66-80. On the emergence of Dutch republican thought after the revolt against Spain, see E. H. Kossmann, Politieke Theorie in het uventimde-eeuwse Nederland (Amster­ dam : N. V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers, 1 960), and on developments in the eighteenth century, I. Leonard Leeb, Ideological Origins ofthe Batavian Revolution (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1 973), both of which focus on discussions of the Dutch national constitution. 54. Antoine-Marie Cerisier, Tableau de l'histoire generale des Provinces units (Utrecht: Schoonhoven and Wild, 1 77 7-84), 1 0:47 1 . 55. Jean Luzac to Jacob Valckenaer, 7 Dec. 1 760, in LUL, Luzac, carton 29. The letter was no mere scholastic exercise: it describes Luzac's determination to return to his studies in spite of his grief over the death of his mother.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution him for an academic career, but Luzac initially wanted to be a lawyer, and he graduated from Leiden University with a degree in that field in 1 768, having written a dissertation on Cicero and Roman law.56 He was offered teaching positions at two Dutch universities, but turned down these opportunities and went into legal practice in The Hague, where he "soon obtained a brilliant reputation," according to one biographer. 57 Had Jean Luzac stuck to the law, and merely hired an employee to edit the family newspaper when he became responsible for it, he would have followed the pattern of the other holders of privileges for French­ language gazettes in the country in the later eighteenth century. In contrast to the editors and publishers of French-language gazettes out­ side of the United Provinces, the owners of the Dutch papers tended to become rentiers, exploiting their local monopolies-each city allowed the publication of only one such gazette-while leaving the actual edi­ torial work to a hired hand. Instead, in 1 77 2 , Luzac returned to Leiden and reluctantly bowed to family pressures to join his uncle in the actual running of the Gautte de Leyde, and by 1 775 he had become the paper's working editor.58 The paper's archives give graphic evidence of the process by which Luzac assumed responsibility from his uncle: month by month, the younger man's handwriting appears on more and more of the documents, even though the correspondence that he drafted con­ tinued to be sent out over Etienne Luzac's signature. In 1 783, the elder Etienne Luzac formally handed over ownership of the newspaper enter­ prise to Jean and his brother Etienne, who became the paper's printer. With their uncle's death in 1 787 , the two brothers became the sole legal owners of the Gautte de Leyde . 59 Although Luzac joined his uncle in putting out the paper, he never committed himself exclusively to journalism. He remained active as a lawyer, participating in several cases that drew national attention in the early 1 780s. Largely as a result of this, he also became an important figure in Leiden city politics, serving briefly as the city council's attorney during the crisis year of 1 785, when radical and moderate factions struggled for power. That was also the year in which he became a 56. Johan Luzac, Specimen Academicum, txhibens obstTValiones nonntdlas apologeticas pro Jurisconsultis Romanis, ad locum Ciceronis in Oratione pro Murtna Capp. XI-XIII prine. (Lei­

den : Luzac, 1 768). 57. ''Jean Luzac," in GGlerie historitpu tks contemporains ou nouvelle biographie (Brussels: Aug. Wahlen et Comp., 1 8 1 7-20), 6 : 345. 58. On Jean Luzac's reluctance to abandon his promising legal career, see Uean Bau­ dus], "Notice sur M. Luzac, mort au desastre de Leyde,"Journal tk l'Empire, 22 Dec. 1 807. Baudus, one-time Hamburg correspondent of the Gaulle tk LeJtk, identified himself as the author of this obituary in a letter to Jean Luzac's brother Etienne, 23 Dec. 1 807 , in Amsterdam University Library, Ms. G.G. I I I . 5 9 . Contract between Etienne Luzac senior and Jean and Etienne Luzac, 1 8 Feb. 1 783, in LGA-VH, Z(2), no. 5 1 .

News and Culture in the Eighteenth Century professor at Leiden University, which led him to reduce his connection with the newspaper by hiring an editor. Academic life was anything but an ivory-tower retreat for Luzac. His initial plan to leave the day-to-day running of the newspaper to an employee never worked satisfactorily, and for most of the period from 1 785 to 1 796, he combined both jobs, even though his professorial status involved him in controversies which became as time- and energy-consuming as his activities in Leiden city politics. Although he never held a major municipal office after 1 785 and never obtained a seat in the Vroedschap or city council, Luzac's political influence, his professorial status, and his solid personal fortune made him a major figure in Leiden's affairs. As if Luzac's involvements with legal proceedings, city politics, and academic affairs were not enough to distract him from the running of the Gazette de Leyde, he was also preoccupied with family matters throughout most of the years of his editorship. His mother's early death left him the eldest of four children, and his extensive family correspon­ dence, particularly with his sister Emilie, testifies to the degree of his involvement with his siblings. His own marriage in 1 784 seems to have been a happy one, and he and his wife had six children. The fact that his sister Emilie was married to Wybo Fijnje, one of the leading radical Patriots, and that his brother Etienne's wife, Johanna Suzanne Val­ ckenaer, was the sister of J ohan Valckenaer, a cousin of the Luzacs and another of the radical Patriot leaders, ensured that the complex family affairs of the Luzacs were inextricably linked with larger political issues that ultimately affected the ownership of the Gazette de Leyde . Particular­ ly during the years of the French and Batavian revolutions, family life was no refuge from the world for Jean Luzac, but rather the arena in which great political conflicts were fought out. The calm tone of the Gazette de Leyde thus in no way reflected the reality of its editor's hectic life. Nor did it reflect his personality. Filippo Mazzei, the peripatetic apostle of eighteenth-century revolutionism , spent a few weeks in Leiden and ever after recalled Luzac's "sweetness of character and perfect kindness of heart. "6o But Matthias Siegenbeek, who later became a Leiden University professor, knew Luzac much better. He recalled the older man as a true and loyal friend, always ready to help others and chronically overworked because of the many commit­ ments he took on. "The main feature of his character . . . the source of his many praiseworthy qualities and at the same time of his minor defects and weaknesses . . . is a strong measure of feeling and a lively sensitivity," Siegenbeek wrote, and he recognized that these traits often 60. Philip Mazzei, Memoirs of the Life and Peregrinations of the Florentine Philip Mazzei 1 730-1 81 6, Howard R. Marraro, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 942), 265 .

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution led Luzac into bitter quarrels.6 1 Punctilious in carrying out his promises, Luzac was often irritated when others failed to appreciate what he had done for them. After the Prussian intervention that suppressed the Dutch Patriot movement in 1 787 had forced his sister Emilie and her husband to flee the country, Luzac made great efforts to help them salvage their property.62 But he apparently could not help reminding them that their political views, which he did not share, were the reason for their troubles. According to a mutual acquaintance, he drove his sister to the point where "she confessed that she would be more easily able to endure the loss of her business and everything she possessed, than his continual and inhuman reproaches."63 Luzac himself, in one of his earliest published writings, acknowledged that he was always frank about his feelings, even at the risk of offending others. "Whenever I have truth and right . . . I am not in the habit of sacrificing them to anyone," he proclaimed.64 Proud and self-righteous, he frequently became embroiled in controversies in which personal animosities became combined with the defense of principles. An angry exchange of pamphlets over a local legal case in 1 775 led his opponent, his half-cousin Elie Luzac, to complain that when he met opposition, Jean Luzac "called the defense of one's own rights or the refusal to yield blindly to the wishes or ideas of another, one-sidedness or stubborn­ ness."65 After he was appointed to the Leiden University faculty in 1 785, he conducted a long-running feud with his colleague Adriaan Kluit about the boundary lines of their respective disciplines, a dispute embit­ tered by the two men's political differences-Kluit was an Orangist, Luzac a Patriot-and their disagreements about academic procedures. Luzac waged war on his colleague both by advancing high-minded arguments based on academic precedents in the university senate and by trying to lure students away from Kluit's classes into his own. Even when the two were persecuted together during the period of the Batavian Republic, Luzac remained hostile to his former rival.66 The same com­ bativeness eventually led him to break off contact with his brother and partner in running the Gazette de Leyde : in 1 798, Etienne wrote to his brother-in-law Johan Valckenaer, "for more than a year I have neither 6 1 . Bilderdijk and Siegenbeek, Ltidens Ramp, 1 52-53. 62. Christine Kroes-Ligtenberg, Dr. Wybo Fijnje (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1 957), 1 07-9, 1 64. 63. AR, DP, note in carton 59, "Contre Luzae." 64. Uohan Luzae], Aantwoord van Mr. Jolw.n LUUIC, aan den Wei. Ed. Heer Mr. Elias Luuu: (Leiden : n.p., 1 775), 2 2 . 6 5 . Elie Luzae. Aamtktningen op het Antwoord van Mr. JoIw.n Luuu: , aan den Wel.-Ed. Heer mr. Elias Luuu: (Leiden: n.p 1 775). n.p. 66. E. J . Vrij . "Het eollegegeschil tussen de hoogleraaren Adriaan Kluit en Jean Luzae," Jaarbot1cjt VOOT gtschitdenis en oudheidJcunde van Ltidtn en omstrtktn 63 ( 1 97 1 ) . 1 2 1 -4 2 . .•

News and Culture in the Eighteenth Century seen him nor talked to him except on the street. "67 The editor of the soft-spoken Gazette de Leyde was a man of strong passions. His newspaper was one of those passions. He often referred to jour­ nalism in a deprecating fashion, and in the first stages of his battle to regain his professorship in 1 796, he even denied that he had had any­ thing to do with the editing of the paper in the years from 1 789 up to the French occupation of the Netherlands.68 In fact, however, there is am­ ple evidence to demonstrate that the Gazette de Leyde played an impor­ tant part in Luzac's life and that it was only with great reluctance that he finally severed his connection with his beloved journal. Throughout the period of his active involvement with the paper, he devoted himself to its affairs. He personally corresponded with people who could provide it with essential information, chiding the American representative in the Netherlands, John Adams, for instance, when the latter began to give the latest news to a rival paper before passing it to LuzaC.69 Even in the two-year period when he had hired Antoine-Marie Cerisier to edit the paper, Luzac remained actively involved in determining its policy.7o When he finally gave up his links with the Gazette de Leyde in 1 798, Luzac complained to his brother about his exclusion from "an establishment made great and famous through hard work, to which I devoted myself body and soul for nearly thirty years."7 l From 1 772 to 1 798, then, the editorial direction o f the Gazette de Leyde was in the hands of a dedicated journalist who was also deeply involved in the great political controversies of his age. Determined to uphold the journalistic tradition established by his uncle, Jean Luzac was equally determined to promote the political ideals he espoused in his own life. Under his leadership, the paper was no mere passive observer of events but a participant in the dramas of the American Revolution, the Dutch Patriot movement, and the French Revolution. 67. Etienne Luzac to VaIckenaer, 1 7 Mar. 1 798, in LUL, Ms. BPL I OS6X. 68. Jean Luzac, ed., Verz.ameling van StukJrm, betTtJlmde het gedrag tier Curalluren van Holland's Universiteil Ie Leyden, in dnajaaren 1 796. en 1 79 7. Bijzmuln- in u zaak van Mr. Johan LtwJC (Leiden: Honkoop, 1 797), 1 2 . 6g. Luzac to John Adams, 1 0 Dec. 1 78 1 , in Adams Papers microfilms, r. S55. 70. The Patriot organizer P. A. Dumont-Pigalle, who was well-informed about the internal politics of the Gaulle de Leyde during 1 785 to 1 787, repeatedly referred to Luzac, rather than Cerisier, as the man who decided what the paper would print. Dumont-Pigalle, letter to Coste, secretary at the French Embassy in The Hague, 2 1 Aug. 1 786, in AR, DP, carton I . Dumont-Pigalle's notes concerning Luzac include a copy of one of the paper's crucial articles about Dutch affairs from August 1 786, when Cerisier was supposedly in control of it, in Luzac's handwriting, strongly suggesting that he himself had written it. Article of 1 5 Aug. 1 786, in ibid., carton 59, "Contre Luzac." 7 " Jean Luzac to Etienne Luzac, 1 4 June 1 799, in LGA-VH, Z(2), no. 1 09.

The Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper

N ewspapers are bound to be conditioned by the society surround­ ing them. But in the case of the Gazette de Leyde, the elucidation of the links between press and society is unusually complicated. This paper was enmeshed in two quite different societies: the Dutch world in which its editor lived and in which the paper was produced, and the wider Euro­ pean world from which its information came and to which it was ad­ dressed. The Dutch world was one of small, self-contained city-repub­ lics, of a certain intellectual stagnation, of a rather rigid bourgeois oligarchy, but also one in which a certain amount of public participation in politics existed. The wider European world was dominated by great monarchies, and it was open to a variety of new ideological and political currents, but it remained in many ways an aristocratic society without participatory political institutions. The concerns of these two societies were quite different, and it is remarkable that an institution so rooted in the special circumstances of Dutch life could play such a large role in the cosmopolitan European world of its day. The Dutch Milieu The United Provinces of the Netherlands in the late eighteenth cen­ tury differed considerably from most other European societies, both in its social structure and in its political institutions. In the aftermath of its successful revolt against the Habsburgs and its subsequent rise to eco­ nomic leadership in Europe, Dutch society had come to be dominated not by titled aristocrats, as most of its neighbors were, but by an urban,

Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper bourgeois elite, drawn originally from the merchant class but composed by the eighteenth century primarily of wealthy rentiers. Over the years, this regent oligarchy had perfected a system of control maintained through carefully arranged marriages, but it had not simply adopted the values of the European aristocracy. In politics, the regent-governed Dutch towns and provinces successfully obstructed the development of any strong central governing institutions: their outlook was antibureau­ cratic and their concern was to keep power dispersed in the councils of the fifty-odd cities represented in the States-General and the Estates of the seven independent provinces. In view of this wide dispersal of political authority, the Netherlands had an early need for a news press: the interconnections, commercial and otherwise, between its different cities required that residents of each community know what was hap­ pening elsewhere. By the eighteenth century, this need was met by publications such as the remarkable Nederlandsche Jaarboek, which col­ lected city council and provincial estate resolutions, appointments to offices, and other politically relevant information from the entire coun­ try in a systematic form and on a massive scale: the volume for 1 785 contains 1 ,780 pages. In some respects, then, the Netherlands seemed more modern than its continental neighbors: the bourgeoisie had triumphed over the landed aristocracy, obtaining the lion's share of both wealth and political power, and there was an extensive system of political communications. But this modernity was only partial. The Dutch bourgeoisie's precocious triumph meant that the country's ruling elite in the eighteenth century was not a forward-looking group open to the opportunities of a rapidly growing economy, but a "bourgeoisie d'ancien regime" produced by the growth of international trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and concerned primarily to convert its wealth into prestigious political titles and sinecures in the eighteenth century. 1 It was not modernity alone that accounted for the rise of an institution such as the Gazette de Leyde within the Netherlands, and indeed the Gazette de Leyde, like the country as a whole, was in some ways a seventeenth-century innovation that had become rather old-fashioned by the time of the French Revolu­ tion. The main ways in which this idiosyncratic society fostered a publica­ tion such as the Gazette de Leyde are obvious. The Dutch Republic ex­ ercised a good deal more tolerance toward the press than most other European states. It had a well-developed printing industry, which had long concentrated on producing for export. And the Republic occupied a central position in the European networks of communications and I. Heinz Schilling, "Die Geschichte der nordlichen Niederliinde und die Modemi­ sierungstheorie," Geschichle und GesellschaJt 8 ( 1 982), 505.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution transport, making it easy for gazetteers to acquire news and send it to their customers. The Gazette de Leyde's Dutch location does pose some significant questions, however. Although the Netherlands had long been the home of a French-language press, the majority of the Dutch­ based publications had declined into insignificance by the time the Gazette de Leyde achieved its greatest importance. Throughout the entire period of Jean Luzac's editorship, his main rivals appeared in other states : the Rhineland, England, and the Austrian Netherlands, and, after 1 789, France. The French Revolution, which suddenly trans­ formed Paris into the center for newspaper publication in Europe, simply completed a process that had begun much earlier. 2 The Dutch newspaper industry had followed a pattern common to many other Dutch commercial and industrial enterprises during the period: without shrinking in absolute terms, it lost ground relative to more dynamic enterprises in neighboring countries, which often benefited from more aggressive state support.3 The question to be resolved, then, is twofold: what qualities of Dutch society and of the city of Leiden had allowed the Gautte de Leyde to establish itself there, and what qualities of that particu­ lar paper enabled it to maintain itself in the midst of the general decline of the Dutch French-language press? The essential reason why French-language publications established themselves in the Netherlands was already clear to the great French press historian Eugene Hatin, writing in 1 865. It was not the existence of legally guaranteed press freedom, but rather the absence of a strong central government capable of controlling the press.4 The Dutch Re­ public had inherited from the Habsburgs the assumption that the sov­ ereign had the right to censor the content of publications and control the industry that manufactured them. In the wake of the revolt against Spain, however, these sovereign powers became dispersed among a host of quasi-independent authorities. Edicts attempting to regulate printing and the press emanated from the States-General, the Estates of the various provinces, and the councils of the different cities represented in those Estates. None of these authorities, however, had any effective machinery to enforce their regulations. The result was a system of de facto press freedom, disturbed but never seriously threatened by peri2. Jean Sgard's survey of the eighteenth-century French-language periodical press shows that the phenomenon was not simply confined to newspapers. The proportion of French-language journals published in the Netherlands declined markedly after 1 750, although the total number of titles was growing rapidly. Jean Sgard, "Journale und Journalisten im Zeitalter der Aufldarung," in Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Rolf Reichardt, and Thomas Schleich, eds., Sozialgeschichtt der Aujkliirung in Frankreich (Munich : R. Olden­ bourg, 1 98 1 ) , 2 : 3 2 . 3. Johan De Vries, De economische Achteruilgang der Republiek i n de Achttiende Eeuw, 2 d ed. (Leiden : Stenfert Kroese, 1 968), 29, 1 7 2 . 4 . Hatin, Gazettes de Hollo.nde. 93.

Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper odic fulminations, ranging from the blanket ban on French-language newspapers in 1 69 1 (which was never enforced) to the notorious con­ demnation of Rousseau's Emile in 1 762.5 In contrast to the Anglo­ American situation in the same period, the Dutch situation did not lead to any philosophical campaign for legal guarantees of press freedom. Since the laws could be evaded so easily, printers and authors had little reason to demand their repeal. Given the absence of effective government regulation, newspapers were able to spring up in the Netherlands to serve a French-speaking market well beyond the country's borders. The major Dutch interna­ tional gazettes were products of the flow of Huguenot refugees into the Low Countries, which had begun some time before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1 685. For Dutch publishers, gazettes were a logical complement to the other French-language publishing activities that developed in the Republic, which included books of all sorts and learned periodicals such as those of Pierre Bayle and Jean Le Clerc. All these enterprises benefited not only from the absence of effective restrictions but from the Dutch preeminence in international trade at the end of the seventeenth century. Despite the lack of a home market for these prod­ ucts, Dutch entrepreneurs, accustomed to exporting goods of all kinds, had the skills necessary to sell them. The publishing industry also en­ joyed an ample supply of cheap paper and a considerable fund of printing expertise: as is well known, in the seventeenth century, Dutch printers such as the Elseviers had been at the forefront of the book industry, perfecting methods for printing inexpensive but high-quality editions. 6 The French-language press originally flourished in the Netherlands also because of the lively intellectual atmosphere fostered by the Hugue­

not refugees and by native Dutchmen at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. By the middle of the eigh­ teenth century, however, the major centers of intellectual creativity in Europe were elsewhere. The reputation of the Dutch universities had declined, and conditions for intellectual activity in the Netherlands dur­ ing this period were not particularly good. J. Grabner, a German ob­ server whose Briefe ii.ber die vereinigten Niederliinde is among the most extensive and interesting descriptions of the country from this period, 5. On the general subject of Dutch press freedom in the period of the Enlightenment. see H. H. Zwager. Nederland en de Verlichting. 2d ed. (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck. I gBO). 54-74. The various edicts affecting the press and printing in the Republic are described in Bodel Nyenhuis. Wetgeving. For the ban on newspapers. which extended an earlier enactment by the Estates of Holland in 1 686. see 1 35-44 ; for the condemnation of

Emile , 1 63· 6. S. H . Steinberg. Five Hundred Years of Printing (New York: Penguin. 1 979 [orig. 1 955]). 1 83-85.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution noted that the opportunities for those who sought to live by their pen were very limited. "The best thinker will not obtain the smallest position on the basis of his literary activities, and if he did not have so many ways to make a reasonable income by other means, he could, in spite of all possible talents, die of hunger.'" Literary life remained relatively back­ ward, the number of critical journals was small, and even the university professors seemed to have little desire to publish. The Dutch publishing industry had maintained its international dominance for a while even after the decline of the country's general economic standing by putting out the works of major writers from other countries, such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, but even this business fell off after 1 760 as more dynamic firms elsewhere, like the Societe Typographique de Neu­ chatel, captured the trade. 8 In view of the declining importance of intellectual life and the print­ ing industry in Holland in the second half of the eighteenth century, the fact that the Gazette de Leyde reached its zenith between 1 770 and 1 795 cannot be explained by reference to the general characteristics that had made the Netherlands a center of French-language publishing around 1 700. When it had been founded in 1 677 by the Huguenot refugee de la Font, the paper had been just one of the many intellectual products of a period fertile in enterprises of all sorts. By the time Jean Luzac became editor in 1 77 2 , however, the Gazette de Leyde was the last of the Dutch French-language gazettes to have maintained itself in the first rank of the European press, and it was probably the last intellectual enterprise in the Netherlands to remain significant on a continental scale. Not the least intriguing aspect of its success was this ability to swim against the current that had swept away every other vestige of the Netherlands' intellectual supremacy. The paper's location in Leiden provides a few clues to the reasons for its survival. French-language papers in some other Dutch cities suffered from handicaps that the Gautte de Leyde did not have to face. In The Hague, the presence of the stadholder's court after 1 748 made the city's papers obvious tools of a clearly identifiable faction, especially after the Orangist court printer, Pierre Gosse, Junior, obtained the privilege for both the Dutch-language and French-language gazettes in 1 770.9 Even the fact that Gosse and his son, Pierre Frederic Gosse, were the most aggressive and competitive publishers in the Netherlands in the 1 770S and 1 780s was not enough to make their French-language gazette a success. Amsterdam also turned out to be a less than ideal location for newspapers, even though it came closest to providing the hustle and 7 · J . Grabner, Brielt iibeT die vereinigten Niederli.inde (Gotha: Ettinger, 1 792), 4° 1 -4. 8. Yves-Z. Dubosq , Le liure frantjais et son commerce en Hollande de 1 750 Ii 1 780 (Amster­ dam: H . J . Paris, 1 925). g. W. P. Sautijn Kluit, De s'Gravenluu&gsche Courant (Leiden : Brill, 1 875), 59.

Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper bustle that is normally assumed to be essential forjournalistic excellence. It seemed superficially to have much in common with the other Euro­ pean cities that housed the most flourishing and varied news press, London and Hamburg. The presence of the Amsterdam Bourse, the great banking houses, and the other appurtenances of a world economic center should have given the Amsterdam gazetteers an edge over their rivals elsewhere in the country. But the city had so many foreign inter­ ests that its government in effect conducted a foreign policy of its own, frequently in conflict with that of the stadholder's court in The Hague. The result was interference with the local gazettes, whose contents always had the potential for causing diplomatic problems. The Amster­ dam city council was sufficiently concerned about the press to keep the operation of its Dutch-language newspaper, the Amsterdamsche Courant, directly under its own control, naming the editor and publishing the paper in a city-owned printing shop, a procedure that does not seem to have been imitated anywhere else in the Republic . l O As a result, the country's major Dutch-language paper was published in Haarlem, not in Amsterdam. The French-language gazette had suffered less from city government interference in the first half of the eighteenth century and enjoyed a good reputation, but the urban vitality of Amsterdam and even the large French-speaking population there, which supported cul­ tural institutions such as a French theater, were not sufficient to keep the paper operating at a high level after 1 760. City government interference also played a role in the final demise of the Gazette d'Utrecht in 1 787, as the privilege was granted and then withdrawn from a succession of publishers for political reasons. I I The genealogical accident of the Luzac family's two generations of talented, dedicated, and long-lived journalists who maintained a per­ sonal interest in the paper had much to do with the success of the Leiden paper. In the other major Dutch cities with French-language papers, the families that owned the hereditary exclusive privileges for such publica­ tions generally became rentiers, farming out the actual running of the papers to hired underlings. Because of the licensing system, newcomers could not compete with these privileged enterprises. The Amsterdam gazette was the most extreme case: a descendant of Jean Tronchin Dubreuil, that paper's publisher in 1 686, was still the paper's owner in 1 795, but the paper's editorship had passed from one hired editor to another after 1 750, none of whom had managed to forge a reputation for journalistic quality . 1 2 The French journalists who edited the Amster1 0. Isabella van Eeghen, "De Amsterdamsche Courant in de Achttiende Eeuw,"joorboelc Amslelodamum 44 ( 1 950). 3 1 -58. 1 1 . W. P. Sautijn Kluit, "Hollandsche en Fransche Utrechtsche Couranten," Bijdragen en Mtdedeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, gevestigd Ie Utrecht 1 ( 1 878), 1 1 3- 1 4. 1 2. M. M. Kleerkooper and W. P. van Stockum, Jr., De Boelrhandel Ie Amsterdam VOOT­ namelijlc in de 1 7e eeuw (The Hague: NijhotT, 1 9 1 4- 1 6) , 840-45 .

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution dam paper for its rentier owners in the 1 780s complained repeatedly about their incompetent interference with it. 1 3 In the period from 1 75 1 to its demise in 1 787, the Gazette d'Utrecht's privilege was held by seven different people ; during the same period, the Gazette de Leyde remained the property of a single owner. This continuity of ownership by a family dedicated to journalistic excellence seems to be characteristic of many outstanding newspapers-the four generations of the Walter family played a crucial role in maintaining the standing of the London Times in the nineteenth century, and the Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty has per­ formed a similar function for the modern New York Times. Had Etienne Luzac not lived long enough to turn the paper over to a blood relative, or had he given up personal control of the paper and lived off the royalties from its privilege, the Gazette de Leyde might have followed the other Dutch French-language gazettes into oblivion, particularly in the face of aggressive competition from such newly founded titles as the Courier du Bas-Rhin and the COUnler de ['Europe, whose editors were unprotected by privileges and therefore were forced to work very hard to make their papers succeed. Etienne's and Jean Luzac's personal devotion to the paper probably had the most to do with the Gazette de Leyde's eventual triumph over the other gazettes. Nevertheless, Leiden was in many ways Cl. favorable en­ vironment for such an enterprise, even though it had few of the charac­ teristics of the great metropolises that have generated internationally significant newspapers either in the eighteenth century or in more modern times. The Rapenburg, a beautiful tree-lined canal with old houses on both sides, on which Jean Luzac lived before his marriage and again at the end of his life, was even then "very noble," according to the English traveler Joseph Marshall, although he added, "but not, as the inhabitants assured me, the finest in Europe." 1 4 But the quiet Rapen­ burg was certainly no Fleet Street. Leiden had been one of the great centers of textile manufacturing in seventeenth-century Holland, and it remained primarily a manufacturing city in Luzac's day, but by then it was not a very prosperous one : the population, which had reached a peak of perhaps 70,000 in the 1 600s, had declined to a mere 28,000 by 1 7 9 3 , and Jean Luzac himself commented to his foreign visitors on the city's decline. 1 5 Of the 4,772 households in the city in 1 7 9 3 , only 795 included servants, indicating that the majority of the population were relatively poor artisans and workers . 1 3 . Fram;ois Bernard to Dumont-Pigalle. 1 7 Feb. 1 786. 25 Oct. 1 786, in AR, DP. carton A. 1 4 . Joseph Marshall, Travels Through Holland, Flanders, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Lap­ land, Russia, the Ukraine and Poland, in the Years 1 768, 1 769, and 1 770 ( London : J . Almon. 1 772). 1 : 34· 15. Petrus F. Blok, Geschiedenis eener Hollandsche Stad (The Hague: Nijhoff. 1 9 1 0- 1 8) . 3 : 7 ; Elkanah Watson. Tour in Holland in 1 784 (Worcester. Mass. : Thomas. 1 790), 1 04-5.

Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Although the news press is often seen as a modern institution, the Gazetle de Leyde was rooted in an archaic urban milieu. The city almanac for 1 790 listed seventy-three guilds, each with its own officers. 1 6 The city had the same hierarchical social structure as most other Dutch towns of the period. Political power was in the hands of a small and fairly stable elite of regent families who dominated the city council and the dozens of urban offices. 1 7 Despite the presence of the famous university, members of the learned professions, among whom a sophisticated journalist would have found the greatest moral support, were few: in addition to the twenty professors, there were only eighteen lawyers in 1 790, twenty­ five doctors, and three professional translators. The university itself was a mere shadow of what it had been early in the eighteenth century. The enrollment in the I 780s was about 400, and none of the faculty ranked among the leading European intellectual figures of the time. The library remained famous for its extensive holdings, but a German visitor com­ plained that the books were jumbled together so that they could not be located and that it was only open for a few hours two days a week. I S The university was still considered the best i n the United Provinces, however, and it did attract a steady stream of foreign visitors and stu­ dents from abroad, from whom an enterprising newspaper editor could recruit valuable contacts in other lands. Alongside the university, there were some signs of independent intellectual life in the city. It was the center of a revival of interest in Dutch literature in the I 760s, marked by the creation of the Maatschappij der N ederlandsche Letterkunde in 1 766; the group, which Jean Luzac presided over in the I 790s, took as its goal the purification of the Dutch language through the compilation of a dictionary and the translation of highly regarded books from other languages, and promoted an appreciation for Dutch writers as opposed to a slavish imitation of foreign models. 19 On the whole, then, Leiden still provided a certain amount of intellectual stimulation, perhaps more than Amsterdam where commerce absorbed so much more energy. Leiden's provinciality was offset to some degree by its place in a well­ developed system of communications and transportation. Since the mid- 1 600s, a unique system of regular passenger barges or trekschuiten linked the major urban centers of Holland. Although Amsterdam en­ joyed the best communications links through this system, statistical mea­ surements show that Leiden ranked a close second.20 In addition to the 16. Natmwijur � in gevOn4en worden de Nannna van de Ed. Groot Achtb. Hurm, Regentm der Stad Leyden (Leyden: A. and J . Honkoop, 1 7go). 1 7. On Leiden's eighteenth-century regents, see Prak, Geutm Burgers. 1 8. Grabner, Brie/e, 426. 1 9. Blok, Geschiedenis, 3 : 283-84. 20. Jan de Vries, "Barges and Capitalism: Passenger Transportation in the Dutch Economy, 1 632- 1 839," Afdeling Agrarische Geschiedenis Landbouwhogeschool Waginmgm 2 1 ( 1 978), 46, 72 .

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

trekschuit network, the Netherlands had an excellent system of postal couriers. Leiden was on many of the main postal routes, including those linking London and Paris with Amsterdam.2 1 Compared with the Am­ sterdam gazette, the Gazette de Leyde was farther from the Amsterdam Bourse, an important communications nexus, but the Gazette de Leyde was closer to the foreign embassies in The Hague, a mere three-and­ a-half hours away by trekschuit. For a publication concerned with events outside the Netherlands, that diplomatic milieu was a more important source of information than the commercial center of Amsterdam. 22 Leiden also was home to several important publishers, including the internationally known Luchtmans firm. 2 3 A list of Dutch booksellers from 1 778 names twenty-six enterprises in the city, making it the second busiest center for the book trade in the Republic after Amsterdam. 24 Although Leiden was not a major center of news-periodical publishing on the scale of Hamburg in Germany (which had two major political newspapers, one commercial paper, and several newsmagazines in the late 1 780s), it supported not only the Gazette de Leyde and the monthly Mercure historique et politique throughout most of the eighteenth century but also a prosperous Dutch-language paper of no particular distinc­ tion, the Leidsche Courant, which probably earned far more money than Luzac's enterprise. 2 5 The Gazette de Leyde was thus published in an urban setting in which the "black art" was sufficiently developed to provide the manpower and skills necessary for its production, although the example of the French-language prin tin g enterprises established in such isolated spots as Bouillon and Neuwied in the same period showed that a peri­ odical could survive quite well without such a thriving publishing milieu. The pocket principalities of Bouillon and Neuwied could not provide a newspaper's editor with the firsthand political education that Leiden did, however. The internal life of this Dutch city-republic was anything 2 1 . J . C. Ovetvoorde, Geschiedenis van het postwezen in Nederland vOiJr 1 795 (Leiden : Sijthoff, 1 902). 22. A German obsetver of the period noted that the English ambassador actually opened and decoded many of the secret dispatches addressed to London, so that the information they contained was potentially available in The Hague even before it crossed the Channel. K. G. Kiittner, Btytriige zur Kennlniss vonilglich des gegenwiiTtigen Zwtandes von FraMreich und Holland (Leipzig: Dyckischen Buchhandlung, 1 792), 303-4. 23. Arie C. Kruseman, Aantekeningen betreJIende den Boekhandel van Noord-Nederland, in de 1 7de en 1 BtU Eeuw (Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1 893), 625. The Luchtmans house later became the well-known academic publishing house of Brill, which still flourishes today. 24. "Alphabetische N aamlijst der Boekverkoopers, met H unne Woonplaatsen, in de Zeven Provincien , Opgemaakt, in den Jaare 1 778," ms. in Amsterdam University Library. collection of the Vereeniging ter Bevordering van de Belangen des Boekhandels. 2 5 . W. P. Sautijn Kluit, "De Hollandsche Leidsche Courant," Mededelingen gedaan in de Vergadering van de Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Leuerlcunde te Leiden ( 1 870-7 1 ) , 3-86. In 1 77 2 , the Leidsche Courant contracted to pay the city an annual royalty of 8.375 gulden, a staggering sum compared to what the French-language paper paid.

Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper but placid. During the period of Jean Luzac's tenure as publisher, Leiden was in an almost continual state of uproar. It experienced seven years of constant local politicking during the Patriottentijd, the period of protest against established institutions, from 1 780 to 1 787, including a major street riot in 1 784, and was the site where the "Leidse Ontwerp," the most important of the Patriot manifestoes of the period, was drawn up in 1 785.26 If the city lacked intellectual figures of international standing, it nonetheless included among its population eloquent spokes­ men of all political persuasions, ranging from Elie Luzac and the poet, pamphleteer, and natural scientist J ohannes Le Francq van Berkhey on the Orangist side to Patriot radical Pieter Vreede, the poet laureate of the Vrijcorps movement. During the Patriotic years, the city saw the rise of several new forms of political organization, including the citizen militia or Vrijcorps and what amounted to political parties. After experi­ encing a year-long battle for control of the city council in 1 785, the city underwent Prussian military occupation and a conservative purge in 1 787, followed by French military occupation and a radical takeover in 1 795, and then by the intense political excitement of the period of the Batavian Republic. Citizens of Leiden experienced all these tumults not as passive victims but as active participants. If Leiden never obtained as much international publicity for its domestic disputes as Geneva, a city not much larger, it can nevertheless be said that its inhabitants were just as passionately involved in the debates over the great issues of the "democratic revolution." Leiden, for all its provinciality, was a micro­ cosm of the world of its day. This constant political tempest kept Luzac alert to the significance of the great issues in other lands that his paper covered. Yet political conflict in Leiden always remained within certain bounds, in contrast to what happened in other Dutch cities such as Utrecht and Amsterdam. The triumphant radicals in 1 785, the vindic­ tive Orangists in 1 787, and the French-backed Batavian republicans in 1 795 never carried out a violent purge of their opponents, which would have involved the suppression of independent voices like that of the Gazetle de Leyde. The milieu of the Netherlands and of the city of Leiden thus nour­ ished the Gazette de Leyde by providing a tolerant political climate, the necessary economic opportunities, and a political culture in which the issues that affected the greater world presented themselves clearly, even if in miniature. Indeed, when one compares Leiden with other cities 26. Cornelius De Wit, De Ntderlandse Revolutie van de Achttiende Eeuw 1 780-1 787 (Oirs­ beek: n.p., 1 974), 66. The text of the "Leydse Ontwerp" is in VeTMmeling van Placaaten,

Resolutien en andere authenth,ke StukJcen em. betr. de gewigtige gebeurtnissen, in de maand Sept. 1 787 en vervolgens in de vereenigde Nederlanden, 50 vols. (Campen: J. A. de Chalmot , 1 78993) 50: 1 85-244.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution where international French-language gazettes appeared in Luzac's day, one may conclude that although many types of urban community could generate such newspapers, Leiden was one of the few in which a politi­ cally independent paper could survive. With its population of 28,000, Leiden was large enough to have some serious political life of its own, and the owner and editor of the Gazette de Uyde was active in that political life. This experience in making political decisions carried over into his editorial activities. In the two great metropolises with French­ language gazettes, London and Amsterdam, this was not the case. In both cities, the ruling elite was far wealthier than the French-language newspaper publishers, who were left to exploit their enterprises in what­ ever fashion they pleased. On the other hand, in small cities with similar papers-Cleves with 4,243 inhabitants, for example, and Neuwied with even fewer-or in medium-sized cities such as Avignon and Cologne, comparable in size to Leiden but without local institutions of self­ government, newspaper publishers were constantly reminded of their dependence on authorities whose actions they could not control. Lack­ ing any experience of political responsibility, they, like the publishers and editors in the big cities, were also more likely to lack journalistic independence.

The Euro pean Environment The urban milieu of Leiden shaped Jean Luzac's political awareness and responsibility. But it was the larger society of continental Europe that shaped his newspaper and the European newspaper press in gen­ eral. In the broadest sense, newspapers became possible earlier in Eu­ rope than elsewhere thanks to the long-standing European penchant for technological tinkering that led to the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century.27 Gutenberg's invention was applied to the dissemination of political news almost immediately, but before the peri­ odical newspaper could replace the pamphlet and the broadsheet, other developments had to occur as well. As noted earlier, periodicity was only practical when dependable postal services developed in the late six­ teenth and early seventeenth centuries.28 Newspapers also depended on a sufficiently large literate audience, with a strong interest in current affairs and the economic means to pay for the information it wanted. A 27. David S. Landes, The Unbound Prumetheus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 969) , 2 1 -3 2 . On the development of printing, see Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin. L'avtnement du livre (Paris: Albin Michel. 1 958). 28. On the French postal system. see Eugene Vaille. Hisloire giniTale des postesfrarn;aises (Paris: Presses universitaires de France. 1 952-55). A regular postal system covering the whole of the U nited Provinces existed by 1 680. Overvoorde. Postweun in Nederland, 83.

Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper general reading public began to emerge in the Middle Ages;29 the quick success of the newspaper formula after its introduction in about 1 600 demonstrates that the public audience was already at hand. Besides technological innovation, an extensive communications sys­ tem, and a large reading public, certain features of the European politi­ cal system also nurtured the press. Both the structure of international relations and the changing relationship between state and society within individual polities helped create an environment for the development of the press before 1 789. The European state system was a patchwork of independent political sovereignties of very different sorts. By the late nineteenth century the sovereign nation-state became the dominant form; the map of eighteenth-century Europe was far more varied. As Albert Sorel has noted, "Every form of government existed in Europe, and all were considered equally legitimate."3o States differed enor­ mously in size and power, from the great monarchies of France and Russia with vast populations and powerful military resources, to the pocket principalities of Anhalt-Zerbst and Massa-Carrara. Absolute monarchies coexisted with limited monarchies in which the monarch shared authority with various estates and republics, each organized in its own way and ranging in size from the United Provinces and the Swiss Federation to the city-states of Venice, Geneva, and Germany. The hundreds of differing governments in eighteenth-century Eu­ rope had few interests in common, and their relative independence of one another made it impossible for the stronger to coerce the weaker in a consistent way. As Sorel put it in the introduction to his L'Europe et La Revolution frant;aise, the international order of the old regime was not a "society of states constituted in an orderly fashion, in which each mem­ ber followed generally recognized principles in his conduct . . . [and] in which the conviction of a solidarity among monarchies assured the maintenance of public order."3 1 The significance of this situation for the development of journalism was that no state could entirely control the How of news within its own borders, because none could count on other states to police information about their neighbors with genuine severity. Before the French Revolu­ tion, the major powers were never willing to work together to achieve effective regulation of the press; they therefore had to live with the consequences of allowing each sovereign state, no matter how small, to set its own rules. And even though no state other than England offered any real legal protection to the news press before 1 789, there were always enough rulers willing to tolerate news publication to ensure the 29· Graff, The Legacies of Lileracy, 75- 1 07. 30. Albert Sorel, L'Eu:rope et la RivolulionfratlflJise, 3 1 . Sorel, L'EuTope. 1 :9.

8 vols. (Paris: Pion, 1 9oB), 1 : 1 5 .

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution availability of newspapers. These states fell into two categories : some were republics, like the Netherlands, or limited monarchies, like Great Britain, which for their own internal reasons permitted a greater degree of press freedom than other countries. This tolerance was often annoy­ ing to neighboring monarchies, but even the relatively weak United Provinces was still too large to be easily intimidated. On the other hand, a number of small and completely defenseless territories, such as the principality of Neuwied on the Rhine, the papal enclave of Avignon in southern France, and the duchy of Bouillon along France's northern border, also permitted a high degree of press freedom.32 In these cases, there was no question of internal press freedom : the local authorities permitted news publication for external consumption only. They calcu­ lated that the profits to be made from permitting periodicals to be published in their territories outweighed the risks of foreign invasion: they assumed that, in the general web of politics, they were too insignifi­ cant to be punished for their transgressions. And, indeed, as the major powers learned that they had to live with such unlicensed publications, their governments found various ways of arriving at a modus vivendi with publishers in these pocket territories. By the eighteenth century the vast majority of governments had not only realized that the political diversity of the continent made it impossi­ ble to control the publication of news but had come to see that it was in their own best interests to facilitate the flow of a considerable volume of information, rather than to obstruct it. From the time of the invention of printing, numerous rulers had seen the value of publicizing their own views of international issues, if not to their own populations, at least to those of other states. Through printed propaganda, one government could expose the bad faith of another and assert the purity of its own motives.33 Over the centuries, printed propaganda concerning interna­ tional disputes became increasingly elaborate. Richelieu patronized Theophraste Renaudot's Gazetle de France, founded in 1 63 1 , because he saw the value of presenting both the French and international public with a regular account of events from a point of view favorable to his government. By the end of the seventeenth century, Louis XIV was sponsoring a complex propaganda machine involving not only the Ga3 2 . On Neuwied, see Karl d'Ester, Das politische Elysium oder die Gespriiche der Todten am Rhein (Neuwied am Rhein : Strtidersche Buchdruckerei, 1 936-37), 39-49. This tiny prin­

cipality's economy depended almost entirely on producing to meet the demands of France's prerevolutionary elite : in addition to publishing, it housed several major furni­ ture-making enterprises serving Versailles and Paris. On Avignon, Rene Moulinas, L'im­ primerie, la librairie tt la presse a Avignon au XVllle sieck (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1 974), 72- 1 07 ; on Bouillon , Raymond F. Birn , Pierre Rousseau and the "Phi­ losophes" of Bouillon (Geneva: I nstitut Voltaire, 1 964) , 74-75, 33. Erich Evenh, Die Oeffentlichkeit in der Aussenpolitik von KaTI V. his Napokon (jena : Fischer, 1 93 1 ) , 2 .

Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper zette but a variety of pamphlets, magazines, and manifestoes specifically prepared for varying audiences.34 Even if it was difficult to specify exactly what tangible results governments expected from this invest­ ment in paper and ink, rulers were convinced of its necessity. Theorists writing about international relations agreed that the image a country projected abroad, the "opinion" it managed to propagate, was a funda­ mental aspect of its power. "The state which has opinion in its favor is always, even if it has inferior physical forces, the stronger in political relations," asserted the editor of the late-eighteenth-century Encyclopedie methodique's section on diplomacy.35 The circulation of news and propaganda to boost one's country's image was, of course, a game that any number could play : it was inher­ ently impossible for any one state to compel all the others to silence except by conquering them all. Hence the European public grew ac­ customed to hearing the arguments of all parties to each major dispute. And in this situation, it would have taken an exceedingly obtuse pro­ pagandist not to realize that he had to frame his works in the expectation that many readers would compare them critically with what his oppo­ nents were saying. The best propaganda, at least for an educated and sophisticated audience, would be propaganda that openly invited com­ parison with opposing views. Efforts to suppress information and the rival parties' statements were likely to backfire by inviting suspicion. By at least the mid-seventeenth century, the European state system had come to accommodate publications that served no other purpose than to collect the news and arguments put forward by the major powers so that those interested could weigh all sides to a dispute and come to a rational conclusion. In the German world, one such collection, the Acta publica , began as early as 1 62 1 .3 6 Most European states ceased to make any special effort to prevent the circulation of official announcements and manifestoes from their rivals; they resigned themselves to a virtually free How of such information in exchange for the right to circulate their own pronouncements as freely as possible. In a private memorandum to the French ministry in 1 759, Chretien Lamoignon de Malesherbes, then directeur-general de La librairie, wrote that the international gazettes "have since time immemorial had the practice of receiving news, statements and justifications from all the princes, so that a gazette is a sort of tribune from which each power has 34. Howard M. Solomon, Public Welfare, Science, and Propaganda in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, N .J . : Princeton University Press, 1 972), 1 08- 1 0 ; Joseph Klaits, Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV (Princeton, N .J . : Princeton University Press, 1 976). 35. Jean-Nicolas Demeunier, Encyclopidie methodique: Economie politique et diplomatique

(Paris: Panckoucke, 1 784- 1 788), 1 :457. 36. Everth, Oeffentlichkeit, 1 55.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution its turn to plead its case before the public."37 As editor of the Gazette de Leyde, Etienne Luzac echoed those words in 1 772 when he reminded a French diplomat that "periodical authors have had the right to publish . . . documents relative to politics for more than a century (you can verify it in all the collections)."38 With respect to international disputes, one can say that there was a tacitly accepted "public space," in Jurgen Haber­ mas's term, by the middle of the seventeenth century.39 Since the exis­ tence of competing independent states made the publication of some news and opinion about international affairs inevitable, the question for each power was how to manipulate the process of publication in its own favor. And among the best strategies for accomplishing this was the insertion of items in ostensibly independent periodicals outside the borders of the state providing the information. There were practical advantages to all governments in encouraging a limited number of respected press organs that could be counted on to publish all their public statements fairly. Such enterprises simplified the publicizing of propaganda claims and guaranteed to each government that readers would see not only the accusations made against it in international disputes but also its own replies. Thus even governments that banned any publication of political news in their own territories colluded in furnishing information to publications such as the Gazette de Leyde. "The views and designs, the intrigues and projects, of courts are let out by insensible degrees and with infinite art and delicacy in the gazettes," a disabused John Adams reported to the American Continental Congress in 1783 ; he feared the impact of these "great engines of fraud and imposture" on "the good people of America" who did not understand how the European journalistic system functioned.40 The question of how best to manage these extraterritorial news­ papers, indispensable for spreading propaganda against rivals but an­ noying when they turned their attention to domestic affairs, troubled governments throughout the eighteenth century, but none found it possible to eliminate their influence altogether. Malesherbes, one of the most enlightened French officials of the century, canvassed almost all of the approaches available to an absolutist government in his lengthy memorandum of 1 759. He had been asked to recommend policy in response to a French printer's request for permission to reprint one of 37. "Memoire sur la gazette d'Hollande." BN. Ms. fro 2 2 1 34. ff. 2 2 7-3 1 . 38. Etienne Luzac to Desnoyers. secretary of the French Embassy in The Hague . 5 July 1 77 2 . in LGA-V H . Z(I). no. 34. 39. For Jurgen Habermas's definition of biirgerliche Ot/fmtlichlceil (which might be trans­ lated as the realm of public discourse in civil society). see StnJctun.vandtl der OeffmtliclWit (Berlin: Luchterhand. 1 962). 1 3-4 1 . 40. Adams to president of Congress. 8 Sept. 1 783. and to livingston. 2 4 June 1 783. in Francis Wharton. ed The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence ofthe United States (Wash­ ington , D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1 889), 6:682 and 6: 504 . .•

Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper the Dutch gazettes for circulation. Malesherbes was no great champion of censorship: in another private memorandum, he had actually recom­ mended the abolition of precensorship of political news, arguing that free discussion would help correct policy errors.41 But faced directly with independent newspapers, he produced a long complaint about their subversive effect in French affairs. He was especially concerned about the Dutch papers' habit of publishing the manifestoes of the parlements and other groups that were in the habit of obstructing the crown's policies, and he admitted that the wide circulation of these papers in France had complicated the task of governing. "The gazettes of Am&terdam and Utrecht circulate all over Europe, set fire to the kingdom, and are constantly giving foreigners an impression of our difficulties that can only be disadvantageous to the state. One could add that this is the means that the inciters of disorder often use to put forward and gain favor with the public for ideas that they would not dare pronounce themselves," he wrote.42 But Malesherbes doubted that an attempt to ban these publications would have any real result. Even if the government were to adopt the double policy of banning the import of foreign gazettes and of publish­ ing a reprint edition of one of them with only the articles about internal French affairs removed, such "cut-up gazettes would only be purchased by those who could not obtain the real ones and there are a thousand ways to smuggle in a printed sheet . . . and the editor, irritated by a prohibition that would certainly reduced his sales, would allow himself even more freedom." The French government could make diplomatic protests to the Dutch about the gazettes, but Malesherbes termed this "always an unfortunate resource," since it lowered the king's ministers' dignity to make repeated complaints about "a miserable libel" and also offered Their High Mightinesses a chance to make embarrassing coun­ tercomplaints on other issues. The most practical recommendation was simply "to show the gazetteers that it would be in their personal interest to be more reserved about the domestic affairs of the kingdom" -in other words, to bribe them. Thus Malesherbes recognized that the exis­ tence of sovereign states outside of France's borders which did not follow a restrictive press policy made it impossible to maintain a rigid system of press controls inside France's borders.43 The various alternatives that Malesherbes considered were actually tried at one time or another by different European governments. Diplo­ matic representatives in The Hague remained convinced that, although 4 1 . Chretien Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Memoires sur fa librairie et sur fa Liberti de fa presse (Paris: Agasse, l Sog), 77-78, 85. 42. Malesherbes, "Memoire sur la gazette d'Hollande." 43. Ibid.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution the gazetteers could not be eliminated, they would prove to be "govern­ able . . . by fear aided by reason."44 Virtually every state in Europe made angry representations to the Dutch States-General about the French­ language gazettes at one time or another during the eighteenth century, but the usual outcome was that Their High Mightinesses in The Hague referred the complaint to the appropriate provincial Estates, which in turn passed it along to the city council of the locality where the paper was published, which, after properly deliberate Dutch consideration of the matter, might summon the editor and urge him to be more cautious. Because diplomatic complaints had little chance of success, govern­ ments frequently did resort to bribery or the extension of special favors to editors. Some journalists, for example Jean Manzon, editor of the important Courier du Bas-Rhin, were quite amenable to such methods, but not all of Manzon's colleagues shared his flexibility: there is no evidence that either Etienne Luzac or his nephew Jean ever allowed such favors to influence the Gazetle de Leyde. Malesherbes had also considered the possibility of allowing the do­ mestic publication of a paper that would give the same or better foreign news as the imported gazettes, in the hope of cutting into their sales. During the most vigorous of the several attempts made in France to bring the parlements and their supporters to heel, the Maupeou "coup" of 1 77 1 -74, such a project was actually tried. Rene Maupeou and the due d' Aiguillon, the hard-line ministers appointed in 1 770 to tame the opposition, had already replaced the editor of the Gazette de France with one of their henchmen, but the traditional constraints on that paper made it unsuitable as a replacement for the foreign gazettes. According to a source hostile to the ministers, they had therefore decided to back a new trimonthly, the Journal historique et politique, which was intended to "eliminate the foreign gazettes." But this critical observer claimed that the project was doomed because the news reports the new journal published were "visibly mutilated, and, by the clever choice of only those facts that favor despotism, exalting it and putting it above all other governments, the aim is to condition the people for servitude."45 The journal, put out by the famous publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke and edited at first by Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet, succeeded in spite of this negative reception, but it did not make much of a dent in the sales of the foreign gazettes and eventually ended up being incorporated as a 44. Abbe Desnoyers. French representative in The Hague, to the due d'Aiguillon, 1 0 J uly 1 77 2 . i n MAE, Corr. Pol.-Hollande, 524. 45. [Pidansat de Mairobert. attrib.]. Journal histurique de la Revolution oph"ee dans la Constitution de la Munarchitfrant;oise. par M. de Maupeou. Chancelitr de France (London: John Adamson. 1 776). 3 : 285 (report dated 16 Oct. 1 77 2 ) .

Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper news supplement in Panckoucke's literary magazine, the Mercure de France.46 The experiment of an officially inspired rival to the Dutch gazettes was only a partial success under Maupeou, but this did not keep either the French or other governments from experimenting with the idea of permitting competition to the established international papers under overt or covert patronage. The French government, which had com­ plete control over the Courrier d'Avignon after it ended a six-year military occupation of the papal enclave in 1 774, also subsidized the London­ based Coumer de ['Europe after 1 777, and permitted publication of a sanitized edition of it in Boulogne during the American War of Inde­ pendence.47 The Prussian government had permitted the establishment of the Courier du Bas-Rhin in Cleves in 1 767. But if such secretly man­ aged international gazettes were to have any impact, they had to be allowed to publish the same sort of news as such genuinely independent international papers as the Gazette de Leyde. As the publisher of the government-subsidized Courrier de l'Europe protested when it was sug­ gested that the paper be put out in Paris, under the eyes of French censors, "What importance would a journal reviewed, corrected, and castrated by the Paris censors have? . . . In that case, the Coumer de ['Europe would be regarded as an ordinary newspaper."48 In his memorandum, Malesherbes had also considered the policy of simply allowing the offending paper to be reprinted inside the country, thus allowing readers to have the independent news they wanted but depriving the offending publisher of his profits. The Austrian emperor Joseph II actually employed this policy against the Gazette de Leyde from 1 786 to 1 792 : angered by the paper's hostility to his project for reopen­ ing the Scheidt River to trade, he granted the Viennese journalist Charles Grandmenil a privilege to reprint the entire text of the Dutch paper and sell it in the Habsburg lands for less than the price of the original.49 There is no evidence, however, that this effort to punish the paper had any effect on its editorial policy. In short, despite many efforts, European governments throughout the eighteenth century had 46. Suzanne Tucoo-Chala, Charles-joseph Panclwucke et fa librairiefraru;aise (Pau : Marnm­ pouey, 1 977), 1 94-202. 47. On the Courrier d'Avignon, Moulinas, L'imprimerie, 324-37; for the French govern­ ment's relations with the Courrier de l'Europe, see Helene Maspero-Clerc, "Une 'gazette anglo-fram;aise' pendant la guerre d'Amerique: Ie 'Courrier de l'Europe' ( 1 776- 1 788)," Annales historiquts de La Rivolutionfraru;aise, no. 227 ( 1 976), 572-94. 48. Swinton to Beaumarchais, 10 Apr. 1 778, in Pierre Augustin Caron de Beau­ marchais, Corresp0nd4nce, Brian M . Morton, ed. (Paris: Nizet, 1 969-78), 4: 1 02-3 . 49. Etienne Luzac to Dutch States-General, 1 786, in LGA-VH, Z(2), no. 7 7 ; Kurt Strasser, Die Wiener Presse in tierjosephinischen Zeit (Vienna: Notring, 1 962), 39-40. I would like to thank Helmut Lang of the Oesterreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, for

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution to concede the truth of Malesherbes's conclusion that the international gazettes were an unavoidable evil. Malesherbes had recognized that newspapers carrying news about France's internal affairs existed not only because there were foreign states prepared to harbor them but because there was a strong market for them within the country. "There is not a single lackey fond of news in Paris who doesn't read them regularly," he complained, and he couched many of his conclusions about the difficulties of suppressing the foreign papers in terms of his assumptions about how their readers would react. 50 The problem he confronted arose from a new force in eigh­ teenth-century life: public opinion. Everywhere on the continent, a growing number of subjects had the education, the wealth, and the experience to believe that they had a right to make independent judg­ ments about political affairs, and this educated public insisted on its right to relevant political information. N or could even supposedly abso­ lutist rulers ignore this demand. Despite the rhetoric they resorted to on ceremonial occasions, Louis XV and other rulers were acutely conscious of the fact that they did not possess absolute power over their subjects. Both in theory and in practice, public opinion had corne to be a major factor in political life. At the level of ideas, all those active in public life during the 1 700s had become increasingly aware of the need to invoke the "tribunal of the public" to justify their political claims. Just as public reaction rather than conformity to traditional artistic rules had become the measure of an actor's or a painter's success,51 so "ministers have become the most carefully observed actors on the stage of the great world, and their performance is the most severely judged," the French minister Jacques Necker observed.52 The concept of "public opinion" as the rational consensus of the private members of society had crystallized in the eighteenth century, as J urgen Habermas has shown in his Strukturwandel der Oeffentlichkeit. Rulers and rebels alike increasingly sought legitimacy for their claims not by referring to divine authority or to the weight of tradition but by asserting that they represented this intangible but powerful force.53 And, of course, recognition of public opinion as the letting me consult a copy of the Gautte de Leyde for 1 3 July 1 792, from his private collection which appears to be an example of this licensed pirate edition. It can be distinguished from the original because its columns of type are somewhat wider: 67 mm instead of the original'S 6 1 mm. 50. Malesherbes, "Memoire sur la gazette d'Hollande." 5 1 . See particularly the analysis in Thomas Crow, "The 'Oath of the Horatii' in 1 785: Painting and Pre-Revolutionary Radicalism in France," Art Hisrory 1 ( 1 978), 426-7 1 . 5 2 . Jacques Necker, De l'administration de,5 finances de la France (N.p., 1 785) 1 :6. 53. On the development of public opinion as a political concept in eighteenth-century France, see Keith Baker, "Politics and Public Opinion Under the Old Regime: Some Reflections," in Censer and Popkin, eds., Press and Po litics in Pre-Revolutionary France , 204-

Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper source of political legitimacy implied recognition of the public's right to relevant political information to form its opinion. According to one writer, the publication of an official gazette that "informs the Nation about current events, from the government's point of view," was one of the characteristics that distinguished European states from such des­ potic states as Turkey, whose principle was "to keep the people igno­ rant."54 At the level of political practice, the recognition of the importance of courting public opinion was a result of the limits of the state's power. By modern standards, even the king of France, ruler of the most powerful of eighteenth-century states, possessed only a weak and clumsy set of administrative tools for implementing his will. He did not need to stand for election or share his powers with an elected representative body, but he did need to persuade his people as well as command them. This required that the subjects be given some sense of what the state was doing and why. Even the French bureaucracy was not always responsive to the ruler unless the population at large was prepared to accept royal policies: many officials had purchased or inherited their offices and could not be removed for refusing to obey. During Louis XV's endless quarrels with his sovereign law courts, the parlements, he repeatedly found that his own officers, the intendants, were often afraid to antago­ nize the powerful aristocratic families that made up the courts by enforc­ ing the king's edicts. Another sphere in which the monarchy needed the subjects' trust was in marketing the bonds which enabled it to survive until the final crisis of 1 788. Here, too, it was essential that the popula­ tion be told of the government's actions and given some reason to believe that royal obligations would be a prudent investment, because the king could not simply compel them to give him their money. It is clear that the independent gazettes played a crucial role in this process. Even if the Gazette de France had been wheeled into the un­ becoming role of bond salesman, its credibility would have been nil. The French situation was not unique; in Tuscany after 1 743, for example, an enlightened, reforming administration actively promoted the publica­ tion of newspapers and journals that sometimes exceeded the govern­ ment's own intentions in pushing for changes.55 For its own political purposes, then, an absolute monarchy often needed an at least apparently independent news press. Moreover, eighteenth-century governments lacked any institutional means of uni45; and Mona Ozouf, "L'Opinion publique," in Keith Baker, 00., The Frmch RIvolubtm and 1M Creation of Modem Political Culture, 3 vols. (Oxford: Pergamon, 1 987-89), 1 :4 1 9-34. 54· GL, 5 Oct. 1 784 (Constantinople, 27 Aug.). 55. Castronovo, Ricuperati, and Capra, La sl4mptJ ita/iana clal cinquecento all'ottocento, 237-39·

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution fying and directing public opinion. Religion had long since ceased to play such a role, at least among the educated classes, and political parties, which had begun to serve this function in England, did not exist in the continental states. The press, particularly the uncensored foreign press, offered a partial substitute. By giving a fairly broad elite the feeling that they were in the know about important political decisions, these more or less independent newspapers served to legitimate absolu­ tist policies. In the absence of other bonds between the state and society, the press offered at least one way in which governments could appeal to the most influential elites among their subjects. The newspapers that filled the need for at least ostensibly indepen­ dent news reporting during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries differed from the elite press of modern times in that they were obliged to seek an international readership. If they circulated only in a single state, their economic survival became dependent on their free access to that one market, giving the government of the state effective control over their contents and vitiating even the pretense of independence. But the ability to reach a multinational audience depended on the existence of a common language read by at least a significant sector of the population in several states. Fortunately for eighteenth-century journalists, there was such a language: French. The adoption of French as the preferred language of nobles, think«:rs, and political elites throughout the conti­ nent created "a kind of intellectual aristocracy, a cosmopolitan patrici­ ate, an oligarchic republic of liberated spirits," who provided the au­ dience for a variety of sophisticated texts in many genres, including political newspapers. 56 This audience was not confined to members of the titled nobility, however; as the publisher of one short-lived French­ language gazette pointed out in his prospectus, French "can be called the language of all nations, equally useful to the nobility, to merchants, and above all to people traveling for business or pleasure."57 This inter­ national audience permitted the development of a high-quality interna­ tional press, including over a dozen competing titles in the late 1 7°Os. Through their ability to find subscribers in so many countries, the French-language papers obtained greater room to maneuver than their rivals in other languages. There were other practical advantages to publishing in French: the fact that French was the language of interna­ tional diplomacy, for example, meant that the raw material for their most important category of news came to the French gazettes in the language in which they printed it, whereas competitors in other lan­ guages had to have their news translated. Because Europe was divided into rival states, a sphere for the public 56. Louis Reau. L'Europefraru;aise au sitek des lumitres (Paris: Albin Mi�hel. 1 � 38), 1'57. Cited in Maria Augusta Morelli Timpanaro. "Persone e Moment! del glornailsmo politico a Firenze dal 1 766 al 1 799," Rassegna degli archivi di stalo 3 1 ( 1 97 1 ), 463-

Environments of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper discussion of political affairs could survive, even though none of these countries guaranteed legal freedom of the press. The fact that even supposedly absolutist governments needed to inform and persuade their subjects as well as command them enabled newspapers that cov­ ered domestic politics to circulate in most European states, even if they could not be published there. The unique role of the French language during this period made it possible for publications in that language to reach a truly international audience and thereby to achieve a degree of independence that would not have been possible had language frontiers corresponded to political boundaries. To be sure, this press had to accept the basic framework of the European order within which it operated. The time when some European countries would offer consti­ tutional protection even to periodicals that openly sought the overthrow of the society in which they appeared, such as the socialist and anarchist journals of the nineteenth century, was still far off. But, despite tough­ sounding censorship laws in most continental countries, the reading public of the late eighteenth century had access to a significant political news press that did much more than merely transmit what governments wanted their subjects to know.

The Eighteenth-Century European Press

The nature of Dutch society and the characteristics of the Euro­ pean state system made the appearance of such newspapers as Jean Luzac's Gazette de Leyde possible, but they did not guarantee the success of his particular publication. To assure its survival and prosperity, Jean Luzac had to find a special place for his journal in the highly competitive international commercial market for political news. In 1 772, the pro­ spectus for a new French-language newspaper promised readers that the editors would digest information from more than 200 other Euro­ pean periodicals. ! Clearly, late-eighteenth-century readers had a wide choice of newspapers and journals ; they usually read several titles to keep up with events. Many readers could compare one newspaper to another more easily than they can today, because they read their papers in a coffeehouse or some other public gathering place, where a large selection of the available news media would be within easy reach. Jean Luzac had to bear in mind rival newspapers and a variety of other channels through which political news was disseminated. Some of these, such as magazines, which were becoming an important feature of the journalistic scene, had a great future ahead of them; others, such as manuscript newsletters and political pamphlets, were products of the special conditions of the early modem world. Altogether, these media constituted a system of journalistic communication unique to the eigh­ teenth century. The Gazette de Leyde's success depended on carving out a unique niche for itself amid this crowd of competitors. 1.

Cited in [Pidansat de Mairobert, attrib.l, Joumal historique, 3 : 285 ( 1 6 Oct. 1 772).

The Eighteenth-Century European Press

The Euro pean News pa per Market By the 1 770S, several hundred newspapers were published in Europe. The majority were either government-sponsored or government-con­ trolled court gazettes, which were precensored and required to devote a good deal of space to the court that sponsored them, or censored provin­ cial papers, which, like the numerous French Affiches, were devoted primarily to advertisments supplemented by literary and political items. The journalistic quality of these periodicals varied tremendously. A court gazette might be censored so closely that it was virtually useless as a guide to events both inside and outside its country of publication: the Gau.etta di Parma, a fairly respectable Italian newspaper, got through the entire year of 1 789 with only one accidental reference to the occurrence of a revolution in Europe's most powerful monarchy, and the Gafeta de Madrid seems to have managed to ignore the event altogether. 2 But this degree of pusillanimity was unusual. Most court gazettes offered a fair amount of news about states other than their own. The carefully con­ trolled Berlinische Nachrichten, for example, gave an explicit summary of the demands the French Third Estate was raising at the beginning of 1 789, remarking admiringly, "The spirit of the free people of America prevails in their petitions."s Even the Gazette de France, the model of the genre, routinely drew on dispatches from the French diplomatic corps to give a reasonably full account of ongoing wars and major public events in foreign capitals. Like most court gazettes, the Gazette de France couched its account of its sponsoring court in elaborate formal language, referring to all local personnages by their full titles. Whereas news from foreign capitals was edited to concentrate primarily on events of definite political signif­ icance-English parliamentary debates, the appointment and dismissal of ministers, the outcome of battles-the domestic news consisted pri­ marily of the round of court ceremonial. As a contemporary critic put it, "This paper says the least about what happens in France, except to report the days when the Royal Family has been to Mass or heard a sermon, the presentations at Court, the marriage contracts the king has approved, etc."4 2 . The Gazz.eua di Parma covered the convening of the Estates-General and occasionally referred to speeches by the king's ministers, but the only hint that anything extraordinary was occurring in Paris and Versailles during the year was a sentence slipped into a story about the revolution in Liege, remarking that "the energetic exam ple of the French Nation in demanding its natural rights cannot fail to stimulate similar desires among her neighbors." Gazz.etla di Parma, 25 Sept. 1 789 (Liege, 20 Aug. and 4 Sept.). 3. Berlinischt Nachrichtm, 1 5 Jan. 1 789 (Paris, 1 Jan.). 4. [Pidansat de Mairobert, attrib.], L'espion anglois (London: John Adamson, 1 777-84), 1 :6-7, ( 1 Dec. 1 775).

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution In the Gazette de France, the French king appeared not as a political figure but as the symbolic center of the country's existence. He paid his respects to a higher sovereignty on Sundays and holidays; he approved the marriages of his noble subjects; he granted audiences to the repre­ sentatives of the various corporate bodies of his realm. Political deci­ sions, such as the issuing of edicts and the appointment of ministers, were only some of the many ways in which the king publicly exhibited his sovereignty, and not necessarily the most important. Such actions were never explained, nor were the other public functions the king performed. The purpose of this kind of journalism was not to make the king's actions rationally comprehensible but simply to render them visible. In this respect, the court gazette was entirely different from the official press of modern totalitarian countries, which aims at inculcating ideological attitudes and refuting opposing views, even if those views are never allowed direct expression. The court gazette was not an ideologi­ cal distortion of the world for political purposes: it was a vehicle for what JUrgen Habermas has called refJriisentative Oeffentlichkeit, that is, for the representation of the ruler to the world as though he himself constituted the public dimension of the polity over which he ruled.5 Political conflict within the realm was depicted as nonexistent and the king's will as omnipotent. The very real political conflicts occurring in other states could be reported in more or less neutral terms: their outcome could in no way affect the king's exercise of his sovereignty at home. Hence the court gazettes characteristically combined relatively objective foreign reports with highly stylized representations of court ceremonial. However insipid they may appear to modern eyes, however, these gazettes were taken seriously as news sources by eighteenth-century readers. Their coverage of international events was usually the first word readers in their country received about such matters, and the court gazettes were not necessarily suspected of distorting the events they covered. It was only when it came to reporting the domestic events of the country where the gazette originated that an outside newspaper enjoyed a distinct advantage. On the other hand, the court gazette was invariably cheaper and reached its audience more quickly, and in its native lan­ guage. Consequently, it is not surprising that court gazettes normally had higher circulations than their outside competitors in their home states. Sales of the Gazette de France exceeded 1 2 ,000 in 1 7 8 1 and 6,000 in 1 787, whereas the total press run of the Gazette de Leyde was just over 4,000 in 1 785. and not all of those copies were destined for France. The continent's newspaper-reading public had by no means rejected the officially sponsored periodical at the time of the French Revolution. 5. Habermas.

StTulctunoandel. 19- 25.

The Eighteenth-Century European Press

The Gazette de Leyde's competition : the London Morning Chronicle (folio format), the Gazette de France (quarto format) and Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet's Annales politiques (octavo format). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Other publications thus had to constantly demonstrate that they had something to offer that the court gazettes could not provide. There were only two major European countries where newspapers were not in theory subject to formal precensorship by their govern­ ments: Great Britain and the Netherlands. In both cases, however, the language these countries' domestic newspapers were printed in and their style of journalism prevented them from finding a broad reader­ ship outside their home countries. Sophisticated readers across the con-

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution tinent recognized the uniqueness of England's uncensored papers, but only a minority even of the educated elites in continental countries could read English. Furthermore, though the English papers were free, they were also notoriously corrupt. It was common knowledge that all the London papers of the 1 770S and 1 780s received subsidies from either the Ministry or the Opposition, and that they routinely accepted paid "paragraphs" attacking private individuals from interested parties.6 A French visitor in 1 777 wrote that "the sixty papers are seasoned with wild stories of all sorts-the most absurd and untrue reports, the most virulent satires, the most offensive personal attacks are offered in quan­ tities with a persistence that may amuse the most reasonable and taciturn Englishman but which charm and delight the canaille ." 7 In any event, until the revolutionary period none of the London papers distinguished itself by its coverage of affairs outside the island, except for stories directly involving British interests, such as the American war. And, as a final handicap to establishing circulation on the continent, the British papers, particularly the large-format London dailies, were extrava­ gantly expensive. According to the American agent in The Hague dur­ ing the . American war for independence, the London Evening Post cost four times as much there as the Gazette de Leyde.8 The Dutch-language press was even less of a potential rival to the French-language international papers. The Dutch papers occasionally circulated in Germany, but elsewhere the language barrier prevented them from developing foreign markets. Like the English papers, the Dutch gazettes concentrated heavily on advertising, which was not of interest to most readers abroad. Except during the Patriot troubles of the 1 780s, they carried less news about their own country than the English press, but their foreign news was generally limited. In 1 789, for example, the Dutch-language Leiden paper normally carried only a few paragraphs in each issue about the French Revolution. Newspapers published in German and Italian, even though they rarely enjoyed the freedom from control characteristic of the English and Dutch press, did compete successfully with the French-language gazettes in some areas. Indeed, the most reputable of the German papers, the four-day-a-week Hamburg Correspondent, had a circulation of over 20,000 at the time of the French Revolution, dwarfing that of all other papers of the time,9 and Joachim von Schwarzkopf did not hesi­ tate to compare its news coverage to that of the best French-language 6. Lucyle Werkmeister, The London Daily Press 1 772-1 792 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1 963). 4-5. 7. FraDl.ois Lacombe, Observations sur Londres ( 1 777). cited in Josephine Grieder. Anglo­ mania in France (/ 740-1 789) (Geneva: Droz. 1 985). 50. 8. Charles Dumas to Congress. 1 2 April 1 7�7. in AR. Dumas. carton I . 9 . Lindemann. Deutsche Presse, 1 62-65.

The Eighteenth-Century European Press papers. The Italian papers were often the best in reporting events in the Mediterranean and the Near East. Regardless of the quality of papers printed in these regions, however, language barriers prevented them from achieving the cosmpolitan status of the French-language gazettes. The most direct competition for the Gazette de Leyde came, then, from the other gazettes that sought to perform the same function as it did. In France itself, one newspaper had managed to avoid censorship and circulate a great deal of news unfavorable to the government during much of the eighteenth century. This was the Jansenist Nouvelles eccli­ siastiques, first published in 1 728 and continued into the Napoleonic period. 10 In the 1 7 50S and I 760s, this remarkable weekly gave extensive coverage to the confrontations between the parlements and the crown that were also the main subject of the Gazette de Leyde's French reports. By the 1 770s, however, the Jansenist paper had changed character, possibly as a result of a secret accommodation with the government, and essentially became a single-issue journal for readers concerned about the theological and canon-law complexities of the religious issues affect­ ing this sect. Throughout the period of Jean Luzac's editorship, there was little overlap between the Gazette de Leyde and the Nouvelles ecclisiasti­ ques .

The same could certainly not be said of the other French-language international gazettes. Collectively, these papers made up the "elite press." They were aimed at readers who wanted the fullest available political information as quickly as possible, those who would not settle for the watered-down information carried in the censored court ga­ zettes. 1 1 These rival texts competed with the Gazette de Leyde for the same news and for the same readership, and they tended to resemble it closely in format and appearance. I ndeed, readers often did not distinguish

between the different papers, referring to them all, even those pub­ lished in other countries, as "la gazette de Hollande." The Leiden paper had been founded roughly contemporaneously with similar publica­ tions in several other Dutch cities, and throughout its life it coexisted with many similar gazettes. There is no evidence that the Gazette de Leyde enjoyed any superiority over its Dutch rivals in the years before 1 770. In the first half of the century, the Gazette d'Amsterdam seems to have been a more important paper. The Amsterdam and Utrecht papers joined the Leiden gazette in publicizing the conflict between the French crown and the parlements in the I 750s, and little distinguished them in reputation during that period. 10. Michel Albaric, "Un page d'histoire de la presse clandestine: 'Les Nouvelles Eccle­ siastiques,' 1 728- 1 803," Rrouefraru;aist d'histoire du lillTe 1 0 ( 1 980), 3 1 9-32 . . 1 1 . On the concept of the "elite press," see John C. Merrill, The Elite Press (New York: Pitman, 1 968), 3- 1 7 .

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution In the period of Jean Luzac's editorship, however, the Gautte de Leyde did manage to elevate itself above its Dutch rivals. During the 1 770S and 1 780s, the Amsterdam and Utrecht papers were in sharp decline. A comparison of the number of collections of the other Dutch French­ language gazettes preserved in major libraries today with those of the Ga:r.ette de Leyde leaves no doubt that the latter was the most influential of the group in this period. 1 2 The Utrecht paper was not able to fill as many pages as its Leiden rival; it normally delivered only six pages per issue, as opposed to Luzac's eight. These two old rivals both saw several changes of editorship, particularly in the stormy 1 780s, and both suffered as a result of the political repression following the collapse of the Dutch Patriot movement in September 1 787. In its last years, the Ga:r.ette d'Utrecht adopted the classic journalistic underdog's strategy of printing salacious material the more successful papers eschewed. In 1 78 2 , the paper's editor told his Paris correspondent to ignore official warnings to be more restrained, saying that he was "determined to keep for his paper the advantage of making noise." l !l The Prussian occupation of the Netherlands marked the end of the Utrecht gazette; the Amsterdam paper continued to appear but had lost all impact on European affairs. At the other end of the Dutch political spectrum, the Ga:r.ette de fA Haye suffered from its status as a thinly disguised court gazette loyal to the stadholder. The Ga:r.ette de Leyde thus emerged as the only important international gazette still published in the Netherlands by the end of the 1 780s. This supremacy in the Dutch market did not mean that the Luzacs' paper lacked competition, however. As the Dutch international press gradually declined new rivals had sprung up in other states. The oldest of these dated to the 1 730s: the Ga:r.ette de Cologne had been founded in 1 733, the Courrier d'Avignon in 1 734. Both were published in small Catholic territories and had a reputation for Ultramontane loyalties. By the 1 77os, neither was a formidable rival in quality to the Gautte de Leyde. The Ga:r.ette de Cologne was poorly edited, and its French news usually lagged behind the Ga:r.ette de Leyde's; indeed, its reports often seem to have been copied directly out of that paper or the Courier du Bas-Rhin. 1 2. Comparison based on holdings listed in the following catalogues: National Union List of Serials (United States), Catalogue collectifdes piriodiques (France), Catalogo dei periodici delle biblioteche iumbarde (Italy), British Union Catalogue of PtriodictJls, SlandoTtskatalog wichtiger Zeitungshtsliinde in dtutschen Bibliotheltm (Germany; holdings as of 1 933), Cmtrale catalogus van periodieltm en seriewerltm in nederlandse bibliotheltm (Netherlands). All of these cata­ logues are incomplete, but there is no reason to believe that their listings reflect a bias that would overstate the number of preserved copies of the Gautle de Leyde compared with those of other titles. 1 3. Cited in Kluit, "Hollandsche en Fransche Utrechtsche Couranten," 1 06. Kluit gives considerable documentary information about the decline of the paper. whose sales in 1 783 were only about 300 copies.

The Eighteenth-Century European Press The Cologne gazette retained a certain importance in French affairs during the 1 780s by publishing critical reports and the more established papers sometimes felt compelled to respond to them. For example, it published accusations that one of Marie-Antoinette's favorites was in­ volved in a complex financial scandal; these stories evoked a denial, undoubtedly supplied from Versailles, in the columns of the GazeUe de Leyde. 1 4 The Cologne paper also played a definite role in the Catholic­ inspired unrest in the Austrian Netherlands during the same years, which provoked the authorities there to plant replies to it in the Gazette de Leyde. Despite its outspokenness, however, there is no evidence that the Gazette de Cologne actually had much impact on European politics on the eve of the French Revolution. The Courrier d'Avignon was a different case, even though it was less independent than any of the other major international papers. Located in the papal enclave of Avignon, it enjoyed relative freedom from politi­ cal control, but it could only circulate with the connivance of the French authorities through whose territories all copies had to pass. After the end of the direct French occupation of Avignon in 1 774, when the paper's editor had relocated to the principality of Monaco for several years, the paper passed under virtually total French control. The French government appointed its editor, and the paper certainly printed noth­ ing that was likely to cause offense in Versailles. 15 The Courrier d'Avignon did print the first report on the journee des Tuiles in Grenoble in June 1 788, an important prerevolutionary incident, but it carefully avoided mentioning that blood had been shed and that the royal troops had lost control of the city. l6 The paper's distinction came from its geographic location : as the only French-language international paper printed south of the Alps, it had a large captive market in southern France, northern

Italy, and the Iberian peninsula. As it was only half the size of the Gazette de Leyde (two four-page issues a week), it also cost much less than its northern rival. Evidence suggests that this paper accepted a minor role on the international scene in exchange for the opportunity to exploit a very lucrative monopoly over its regional market. 14. The stories involved the "affaire des alluvions," a dispute over royal claims to the new soil deposited along the banks of the Gironde River in the Bordeaux region, which came to a head in 1 786. The GauUe de Cologne's story accusing Marie-Antoinette's favorite the duc de Polignac of trying to profit from his position at the expense of local noble landowners appeared in the issue of 1 5 June 1 786 (Paris, 10 June). There was an editorial note in the Gautle de Leydt of 14 July (Leiden, 1 2 July) stating that the paper had been informed that the duc de Polignac was not involved in the affair. On the details of the affair, see William Doyle, The PaTlemtnt ofBordeaux and the End ofthe Old Regime (New York: St. Manin's Press, 1 974), 250-58. 1 5. Moulinas, L'imprimerie, 328-30; Charles F. Hinds, ''The COUnler d'Avignon in the Reign of Louis XVI" (M.A. thesis, University of Kentucky, 1 958). 1 6. Jean Sgard, Les tTenle Ticits de la JOIl:mie des Tuiles (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1 988). 4 1 .

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution Despite the continued existence of similar long-established papers in the Netherlands, Avignon, and elsewhere, the rival gazettes that pro­ vided the Leiden paper with its most serious competition were newer titles that had sprung up after the Seven Years' War. Two of the most important of these, the Courier du Bas-Rhin and the Coumer de i'Europe, were located in the territories of major powers, rather than in small states in the interstices of the European state system. The Courier du Bas­ Rhin appeared in the Prussian garrison town of Cleves, the Courrier de i'Europe in London. The Coumer de i'Europe, founded in 1 776, enjoyed a privileged location in the British capital, but rather than being able to take advantage of the famous English freedom of the press, this publica­ tion ended up being tightly controlled by both the British and French governments at a time when they were in open conflict with one an­ other. As the American diplomat and future president John Adams explained to the Continental Congress, "if it should offend the English essentially, the ministry would prevent its publication ; if it should sin against the French unpardonably, the ministry would instantly stop its circulation." I ' The Courrier de i'Europe thus deserved its reputation of servility, but this did not prevent it from being a highly successful business enterprise : the French government subsidized it lavishly, tak­ ing a bulk order of 4,800 subscriptions-almost equal to the entire press run of the Gazette de Leyde-and intervened to protect it against un­ wanted competition, while the British government secretly paid its pub­ lisher to spy on his French patrons. 18 Its London location did give the CourTier de i'Europe an advantage in covering the American war, because most information about the hos­ tilities passed through London. (During the war, the paper published a bowdlerized edition for continental distribution in Boulogne-sur-Mer.) But the paper's coverage of French affairs had no credibility within the country, and the paper's main selling point was its reporting of the British Parliament's debates; indeed, it claimed that it brought together in one place information on British politics that could otherwise be found only by reading the full range of the British press. 1 9 Its French news was invariably pro-ministerial and often very incomplete: it made no mention of Necker's dismissal in 1 78 1 , said nothing about the arrest of Cardinal de Rohan when the Diamond Necklace scandal broke in 1 785. and castigated all opponents of Calonne's and Brienne's at1 7. Adams to president of Congress, 8 Sept. 1 783, cited in Wharton, ed., Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence, 6:682 . 1 8. Ccrrrespondance politique et anecdotique sur Its affaires de {'Europe (N . p . , 1 789-90), 1 :9293, Maastricht, 2 1 Nov. 1 780; Helene Maspero-Clerc, "Samuel Swinton, editeur du Cou­ rier de l'Europe a Boulogne-sur-Mer ( 1 778- 1 783) et agent secret du gouvernement britannique," Annalts historiques de la Rivolutionfra1Ujaise, no. 262 ( 1 985), 527-3 1 . I g. Courrier de I'Europt, l g ]an. 1 78 1 .

The Eighteenth-Century European Press tempted reform measures in 1 787 and 1 788. Certainly more informa­ tive than the GazeUe de France, the Courrier de l'Europe was nevertheless far from being an independent account of French political life. The Courier du Bas-Rhin, like the Coumer de l'Europe, was widely known to be under the thumb of its host government. But its editor, Jean Manzon, was a genuinely talented journalist who succeeded in making his paper a major presence on the European journalistic scene. His was the only other international gazette that the GazeUe de Leyde felt compelled to treat, albeit reluctantly, as something of an equal. In international affairs, the Courier du Bas-Rhin was frequently labeled "l'oracle de Berlin" because of its understandable adherence to a pro­ Prussian line, but this restraint did not hinder the paper in its coverage of domestic disputes in other states. Manzon sold his services freely and engaged in various blackmailing schemes-in other words, his ethics resembled those of the leading English journalists of the period-but he wrote in a lively style and produced a highly readable paper. His paper had more intellectual content than the other gazettes. He flirted with the philosophes, and allied himself with the most original political journalist of the prerevolutionary years, Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet. Like Luzac, Manzon had unmistakable political biases, but his were nearly always in direct opposition to those of the GazeUe de Leyde. Whereas the Leiden paper was normally the organ of constituted bodies struggling against real or imagined threats of despotism, Manzon was the habitual advocate of strong central authority. He was for the French crown against the parlements and for the Dutch stadholder against the Pa­ triots. When the French prerevolutionary crisis generated demands for greater public involvement in politics, the Courier du Bas-Rhin com­ mented sarcastically, "There is no doubt that we will soon have in France

some of this ingredient called patriotism, which has been sown so plen­ tifully in the disunited provinces of the Low Countries." Later in the year, the paper dismissed the general proposition that rulers were bound to respect their country's traditional institutions with the remark that "the constitution of any state can be completely transformed, with­ out any infringement on the privileges of a nation."20 Of all the other gazettes it had to compete with, the Courier du Bas­ Rhin was the only one that the Gazette de Leyde ever felt compelled to respond to directly. The Courier du Bas-Rhin regularly provoked such a dialogue in its own columns, particularly during the years of the Dutch Patriot movement in the 1 780s, when it frequently attacked Luzac and his paper for their opposition to the House of Orange. Luzac's circle of French-speaking Patriot acquaintances responded with pamphlets 20. Courier du Bas-Rhin. 18 July 1 787 (Paris. 10 July); and I I Aug. 1 787 (Brussel s, Aug.).

5

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution aimed at the rival paper-such as Dumont-Pigalle's The Dinner at the Golden Lion, or the Singular Adventures that happened in July I 78J to Mr. Manum, alias, Loud-Mouth, editor of the gazette called the 'Courier du Bas­ Rhin' and Luzac's correspondence proves that he paid close attention to this annoying rival. In the face of this rigorous competition, the Gazette de Leyde sought to distinguish itself by a sober tone and cautious reporting. To be sure, Luzac's paper was not a colorless chronicle, but more than his rivals, Luzac insinuated his political opinions into his paper indirectly. He wrote no sarcastic footnotes commenting on the dispatches he printed, as Jean Manzon often did in the Courier du Bas-Rhin. Luzac's paper was not always first with the news, and indeed it sometimes held back reports that appeared in rival papers, but when it did so, the avowed reason was always to confirm stories that seemed confusing or hard to believe. But the Gazette de Leyde never passed over significant events in silence, as the Courrier de l'Europe or the Courrier d'Avignon sometimes did. Luzac's journalistic formula was not the only one that led to success at the end of the Old Regime, but it had the unique quality of combining a strong attraction for the general public with a strong appeal to governing elites. According to a French source from the 1 780s, the Leiden paper was "the most sought after in recent years, because it sometimes contained fresher and more detailed political news than the others." In this way, it satisfied the reading public, but it also pleased the French authorities, because "it was ordinarily very circumspect and extremely quiet about sensitive issues."2 1 Ministers recognized that material published in the Gazette de Leyde had more credibility than what was inserted in its rivals: as John Adams reported, the ministers favored Luzac for items concern­ ing "the more grave and solid objects," reserving for less distinguished papers items designed to affect "the small talk of coffee-houses, and still smaller and lower circles."22 Other papers, such as the Courier du Bas­ Rhin, might on occasion be more titillating or provocative, but the Gazette de Leyde had succeeded in carving out a niche in the market for international gazettes by winning the trust of readers and rulers alike. -

Alternatives to the News p ap ers Besides other newspapers, the Gazette de Leyde had to compete with manuscript newsletters or nouvelles a La main . These handwritten bul2 1 . [Pidansat de Mairoben, attrib.] Mimoirts stcrets, 28: 1 66 (8 March 1 785). 22. Adams to president of Congress, 8 Sept. 1 783, in Whanon, ed. , Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence, 6 : 682 . Adams said that the Gautte d'AmsteTdam was also em­ ployed in this regard, but there is little evidence that it was actually taken seriously by most European governments by this time.

The Eighteenth-Century European Press

[ 57 ]

letins had flourished since the sixteenth century and the Fugger newslet­ ters of that time. The composers of these nouveUes were engaged in exactly the same enterprise as the correspondents of the international newspapers, and in fact they were often the same people. For example, the Paris correspondence printed in the Courier du Bas-Rhin during the late 1 760s later appeared as part of the printed version of an extensive set of nouvelles a la main, the so-called Memoires secrets de Bachaumont.23 Compared to the international newspapers, these newsletters offered the attraction of quicker delivery, as they did not have to be sent to a distant location to be printed and then mailed to subscribers who were often closer to the source of the news than their newspaper was. The newsletters also had the lure of being apparently completely free of censorship, although the example of the Paris newsletter enterprises of the 1 770S and 1 780s shows that this notion was misleading: the police had their ways of tracing and pressuring the manuscript nouvellistes just as they did the printed newspapers. Louis-Sebastien Mercier claimed that the manuscript nouvellistes operated with the knowledge and ap­ proval of the ministers, and the Germanjournalist Schlozer asserted that the French ministers secretly paid the author of one of the main Paris newsletters to avoid being attacked in it.24 The authors of these manu­ script news services certainly tried to stress the superiority of their products to the printed gazettes. The author of one set of bulletins, later published under the title of the Espion anglois, prefaced his work with a stinging critique of his printed rivals. "Aside from the fact that they have to divide their attention among the various states they report on," he wrote, "they are desperate to be allowed to circulate in Paris, and as a result they are reduced to silence or flattery on a multitude of topics, to avoid being banned. "25 While Jean Luzac was editing the Gazette de Leyde, two great manu­ script news bulletins emanated from Paris, and similar enterprises ex­ isted in other major European capitals. One of the Parisian bulletins was the "Bachaumont" operation, whose manuscripts eventually provided most of the material published as the Memoires secrets in the 1 780s; 2 6 the 23. Fram;ois Moureau, "Les memoires secrets de Bachaumont, Ie Courier du Bas-Rhin et les 'bulletinistes' parisiens," in Jean Varloot and Paule Jansen, eds., L'anrnie 1 768 i Hravers la presse tTaitie par ordinateur (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1 98 1 ), 5879 · 24. Louis-sebastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, "nouvelle edition," \ 0 vols. (Amsterdam, 1 782-88), 7: 1 8; Schlozer, Briefwechsel meist historischen und politischen Inhalts, vol. 6, no. 4 1 , 2 7 1 -72 (25 Oct. 1 780). 25. [Pidansat de Mairobert. attrib.}, L'espion anglois, 1 : 7 ( 1 Dec. 1 775)' 26. The only comprehensive work on the eighteenth-century manuscript newsletters remains Frantz Funck-Brentano, Figaro et ses devanciers (Paris: Hachette. 1 909). On the Bachaumont enterprise. see also Robert S. Tate, Jr. , "Petit de Bachaumont: His Circle and the Mhnoires secrets," (Geneva: Institut Voltaire. 1 968). Corrections to it are in Louis

[58]

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

other, known as the "Metra," combined a manuscript news service with a printed bulletin devoted to literature known as the Correspondance se­ crete.27 An example from central Europe is the manuscript later pub­ lished under the title Correspondance politique et anecdotique sur les afJaires de i'Europe, devoted primarily to Austrian affairs but with some coverage of other German capitals.28 These manuscript bulletins contained a certain amount of material that did not appear even in the best-informed printed news media. In particular, the nouvelles included many personal anecdotes about public personalities which never appeared in the gazettes, and their authors allowed themselves a freedom in commenting on their news reports that their printing-press rivals did not enjoy. "They are particularly hard on private individuals; silent vengeance insinuates itself in these almost invisible canals, which carry poisonous malignity everywhere," Mercier wrote. 29 The newsletters' gossipy tone resembled the scandalous "para­ graphs" of the London press more than the sober content of the conti­ nental gazettes. Thus both the international gazettes and the newsletters gave extensive space to a series of sensational Paris court cases in the mid- I 77os, but whereas the papers simply summarized the juicier testi­ mony, the Metra bulletiniste felt free to add, "You will have remarked that when the judgments have been handed down, the credit of the well­ connected party has always enabled him to triumph over the weaker one."30 Even crowned heads were not safe from the manuscript journal­ ists. The Correspondance politique et anecdotique, based somewhere in cen­ tral Europe, allowed itself to retail an item about counterfeit French coins supposedly circulating in Frankfurt, with the portrait of Louis XVI "decorated with the headdress that the Eternal gave to Moses," and its first report on Frederic the Great's successor on the Prussian throne in 1 786 praised him because "he hasn't had anything like an orgy, hasn't touched a woman's breast since he ascended the throne."31 Olivier, "Bachaumont the Chronicler: A Doubtful Renown," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 1 43 ( 1 975), 1 6 1 -79; and Moureau, "Les mernoires secrets." 27. The Metra enterprise operated out of the small German principality of Neuwied, on the Rhine near Frankfurt. The manuscript news bulletins it sent out were first published in A. Lescure, ed., Correspondance secrete ineditt sur Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, la cour et la ville de 1 7 77 a 1 792 (Paris: Pion, 1 866). One manuscript set of the news bulletins is now in the Lilly Library, Indiana University. On the Metra news service, see, in addition to Funck­ Brentano, Martin Fontius, "Mettra und seine Korrespondenzen," Romanische Forschungen 76 ( 1 964), 405-2 1 ; and Cecile Douxchamps-Lefevre. "Un magazine de la Cour de France au debut du regne de Louis XVI," Revue historique, no. 549 ( 1 984), 95- 1 08. 28. Unlike the "Bachaumont" and "Metra" correspondences, this interesting set of news bulletins has not been employed much by scholars working on the period. There is a copy in the GOttingen University library. 29. Mercier, Tableau, 7: 1 8. 30. Lescure, ed. , Correspondance in/ditt, 1 :54 (9 May 1 777)· 3 1 . Correspondance politique et anecdotique, 4:48 (Frankfurt, 17 May 1 786); 4 :93 (Berlin, 29 A u g . 1 786).

The Eighteenth-Century European Press In these manuscript newsletters, the Gazette de Leyde faced a rival that could provide a more comprehensive picture of the same political events, but although they certainly enriched the picture of events that readers received, they tended to merely embroider the hard news the printed gazettes carried. Mercier pointed out that the nouvelks a la 1TI4in never succeeded in giving advance notice of genuinely important politi­ cal events.3 2 The censored gazettes of the continent might be ordered to pass over a significant occurrence in total silence, as the Gau.etta di Parma did during the French Revolution, but the Gazette de Leyde and other international gazettes could not be controlled the same way. A com­ parison of the Luzac paper with the two main French newsletters of the period shows that no crucial French political event of the period went unmentioned in the Leiden paper, and that the information about France the paper printed was as up to date as that of its manuscript rivals. The difference was in the wealth of "human interest" anecdotes and snide comments that "Metra" and "Bachaumont" could offer their subscribers. When it came to the great public events, the stuff of history, the Leiden paper was comprehensive. Moreover, the hand-copied nouvelles could not reach as broad an audience as the printed newspapers. These manuscript news services were costly, and even on the most generous estimates they could not produce as many copies as the printed journals. As the preface to a subsequent printed version of the "Metra" literary bulletins noted, ''The high cost of this sheet and the discretion with which it has had to be distributed have prevented it from being very widely read."!J!J In addi­ tion, most such services covered news from only a single capital. These gossipy bulletins went primarily to rulers and wealthy noblemen. Even­ tually, versions of these manuscripts made their way into print ; for example, the published works derived from the "Bachaumont" bulletins nearly achieved the regularity of a periodical publication by the early 1 780s, in the form of the Mimoires secrets. But by the time they did appear in print, the gossip had lost its freshness: these bulletins were contemporary history, not journalism. Another reason why the Gazette de Leyde did not suffer unduly from the competition of the manuscript newsletters had to do with its status as a public institution. Once news was published in the paper's columns, it was known in principle to the entire world, and actors on the public stage had to conduct themselves accordingly. Furthermore, the paper had a definite reputation for reliability; its reports carried a certain credibility. In contrast, the information in the manuscript newsletters, 3 2 . Mercier, Tableau, 7 : 1 9. 33. COrTISpondanci SICf'tU, politiqut It liUiraire, au Memoirls pour servir a I'Histoire Us COUTS, Us Sod/tis & de La littiraturl en France, defmis La mort de Louis XV. (London: John Adamson, 1 787). I : preface.

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although they undoubtedly circulated widely among political inside rs, was not public. Indeed, their great attraction was their promise to pro­ vide secret information that would be known only to their subscribers. Because an item was ostensibly secret, however, public figures could afford to ignore it if they wished. Certainly they could not be compelled to respond to it, as they might have to in the case of published reports. And the manuscript services had none of the cachet of credibility that the Gazette de Leyde enjoyed. Their reports were not subject to critical examination and possible correction. By their very nature, they carried a great deal of information that could never be verified-rumors, sup­ posed transcripts of conversations, stories about the sexual lives of prominent people. The journalist and polemicist Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet, himself a frequent target of attacks in the Mhnoires secrets, was telling the truth when he asserted that everyone in Paris knew how unreliable the gossip that ended up in the newsletters was; consequently readers gave only "partial credence to these fleeting slanders." He dismissed the Bachau­ mont memoirs as "a collection of these respectable fables."34 However plausible the stories they recounted, the manuscript newsletters' powers of persuasion depended on their readers' willingness to suspend their critical faculties to a certain degree, whereas the Gazette de Leyde's proud­ est claim was that the material it printed could be verified. The two genres of reporting were thus very different forms ofjournalism, fulfill­ ing two different functions. The "Bachaumont" newsletters certainly have great interest as sources for historians today, but it is by no means evident that their contemporary impact was more significant than that of the duller but more reliable Gazette de Leyde. Like the newsletters, political magazines shared some of the functions of the international gazettes. In fact, a number of magazines included a political news section that was in effect simply a gazette. The Journal de Bruxelles, a news supplement included with the popular literary journal Mercure de France, was a good example. This periodical, published in France with an official privilege, included nothing controversial, but its content differed considerably from the Gazette de France in being much less court-centered. It omitted all reference to political controversy, such as the quarrels between crown and parlements, but gave full coverage to such events as natural disasters: in 1 788, it provided the most com­ prehensive reporting to be found in the European press on the terrible hailstorm of 1 3 July, which led to the high grain prices that helped spark unrest in France in 1 789. In the German-speaking world, magazines actually carne closer to performing the functions of the elite political press than did the news34 · Annales politiques, 1 : 496 -9 7 ( 1 777) ·

The Eighteenth-Century European Press

[6 1 ]

papers. During Luzac's day, August Ludwig von Schlozer's Stats-Anzei­ gen and Gottlob Benedikt von Schirach's PolitischeJournal dominated the German political press. The Stats-Anzeigen, a quarterly, combined a certain amount of current news with a variety of reprinted documents and pamphlets, all enlivened by its editor's often caustic critical foot­ notes. Schlozer's journalistic formula was less wedded to the news of the moment and more determined to give readers the perspective they needed to understand events. Even more successful in terms of circula­ tion than the Stats-Anzeigen was the Altona journalist Schirach's Politische Journal. This monthly magazine printed almost exclusively current news, rather than combining journalism with historical interests as Schlozer did. It gave readers a streamlined summary of recent events, easier to follow than the stories in newspapers, and it had the advantage of being able to omit all the commercial advertising that took up half the space in the best German newspaper of the period, the Hamburg Corre­ spondent. As a central locus for political news about the German states, the Politische Journal actually performed much the same function as the Gazette de Leyde did for the French political world; it benefited from the fact that newspapers had a more commercial role in the German-speak­ ing world than they did in the French-speaking regions. The French-speaking world also had a variety of news periodicals that were more like modern magazines than newspapers. There was no direct equivalent to the Stats-Anzeigen in terms of quality, and the demise of the Leiden-based Mercure historique et politique in 1 773 marked the disappearance of publications similar to the Politsche Journal. Luzac had to bear in mind journals such as the Affaires de l'Angleterre et l'Amirique, a "single-issue" periodical devoted to the American war, which appeared from 1 776 to 1779 with covert backing from the French government, and the Politique hollandois, a similar publication intended to acquaint the European public with the later stages of the American war and then with the issues in the Dutch Patriot period. Both journals printed documents and ideological commentary. An even more overtly ideological news publication appeared in the Belgian provinces in 1 785: the Journal general de l'Europe, tolerated by Joseph II because of its outspoken sup­ port for his controversial reform program. In its openly committed tone, it foreshadowed the revolutionary press that developed in France in 1 789. The most striking success in employing the magazine medium for political purposes before the French Revolution, however, was Linguet's Annales politiques, a venture in which news reporting gave way to political commentary.35 Linguet's endless embroilments with the French and 35. On Linguet's life and his journal, see Darline Gay Levy, The Ideas and Careers of Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1 980).

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution other governments and his irregular work habits kept his journal from ever achieving regular periodicity. It appeared erratically even at the best of times and was repeatedly interrupted, particularly by the au­ thor's two-year stay in the Bastille in 1 780-82. When it did appear, however, it offered a dynamic model of journalism very different from the Luzacs' style. Linguet was less concerned with providing a chronicle of events than with delivering his personal opinion about their meaning. Whereas the Gazette de Leyde accepted the structure of the world it reported on as a given, Linguet constantly called it into question. He argued that force was the basis of social relations and of the right of property, that slavery was more humane than the modern wage system, and that both the French and British constitutions were fundamentally VICIOUS.

Linguet delivered his controversial opinions in highly colored prose, far removed from the stilted tone of the international gazettes. His intention was to overwhelm his readers emotionally, rather than to convince them by a sober appeal to their reason. Though he was often dismissed by contemporaries for his "paradoxes," he was a great success with the European reading public. "Even if Linguet was not the founder of an already existing genre," remarks an Italian scholar, "he was cer­ tainly its most original and intelligent practitioner, the only one able to turn it into an effective instrument of political criticism and of the diffusion of ideas."36 Linguet's journal was extensively counterfeited all over the continent and may well have had the largest circulation of any French-language political periodical issued before the French Revolution.37 Further­ more, Linguet's techniques clearly foreshadowed those of the French revolutionary press. The highly charged rhetoric of his articles, the direct attacks on political figures he disliked, and his overt determina­ tion to change government policies rather than merely to describe them were all completely antithetical to the formal rules adhered to by the international gazettes. These features signaled the arrival of a new spirit on the journalistic scene. The fact that Linguet's journal prospered because of secret arrangements with the French Foreign Ministry in no way diminishes its revolutionary impact: the minister (the unimagina­ tive comte de Vergennes) and his underlings, who carefully controlled the letter of Linguet's text, simply failed to comprehend its spirit. For all his success in demonstrating the new possibilities of individu­ alistic political journalism, however, Linguet seems to have had little immediate impact on the traditional political journalism of the interna36. Ginevra Conti Odorisio, S. N. H. Linf5lUt dall'ancien regime alia rivoluzione (Rome: Giuffre, 1 976), 20 1 . 37. Jeremy D . Popkin , "Un journaliste face au marche des periodiques," in Hans 80ts, ed. , La diffusion et Ia lecture des joumaux de lanf5IU fraTUjaise sow l'ancien regime (Amsterdam and Maarssen : APA-Holland University Press, 1 988), 1 1 - 1 9 ·

The Eighteenth-Century European Press tional gazettes. Linguet had no intention of competing with them di­ rectly and often referred readers to them for the bare details of the news. "I leave it to the gazettes to risk the succession of contradictory reports that fill their columns, and keep their readers in suspense," he wrote in one of his early issues, "That is not my object. Minor or uncertain reports are not . . . what you expect from me."3 8 The total circulation of the Annales politiques was far above that of any of the international gazettes, but it by no means diminished their appeal. Readers still wanted a steady, dependable flow of news, as well as the combination of information, entertainment, and provocation that Linguet delivered. Although his success anticipated the evolution of opinion journalism and the eventual decline of the "impartial narrator" whose voice the international gazettes claimed to embody, Linguet's achievement was essentially the creation of a unique form ofjournalism and a new market for it. The court gazettes and other newspapers of the continent, the manu­ script newsletters, and the magazines that appeared contemporaneously with the Gazette de Leyde all shared the general characteristic of periodici­ ty-even if some of them, like Linguet's Annales, honored that principle only in the breach. But another genre of nonperiodic publication was also fundamental to eighteenth-century political discourse: the pam­ phlet. The political pamphlet had come into existence more than a century before the newspaper, and it was important well into the nine­ teenth century, before being displaced by its periodical rival.39 During the eighteenth century, pamphlets were still at least as influential as periodicals. But there was no basic incompatibility between the func­ tions of newspapers and those of pamphlets in this period. In fact, many pamphleteers referred to the international press to provide readers with the factual background they needed to understand the pamphlets. And many a pamphleteer was spurred to action by an article in an interna­ tional paper, as was the author of a pamphlet on the rights of Jews in France who began his work, "My attention was recently caught by an article in the gazette de Hollande. "40 Newspapers frequently referred their readers to relevant pamphlets, or even published their texts in their own columns. The Gazette de Leyde mentioned more than fifty French political pamphlets in the two years before the convening of the Estates-General in 1 789. 38. Annalts poliliques. 2 : 2 2 . 39. Unlike periodical publications. pamphlets as a genre have received little systematic study, although specific corpuses of texts, such as the pamphlets of the Protestant Refor­ mation. have been analyzed. For an introduction to the existing literature. see Lester Condit. A Pamphlet about Pamphltts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1 939). 40. [Bernard de Valabregue]. Lettre au rtjlexions d'un Milord Ii san C/J'TTespondam Ii Paris; Au sujtt de la Requite des Marchands des Six-Corps. cantre l'admission des Juifs aux Brevets. etc. (London: n.p., 1 768). p. 6.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution Because pamphlets did not rely on subscription sales for their diffu­ sion, they could more easily evade censorship regulations. They did not require a specially organized printingshop permanently committed to their production, so they could be turned out close to the scene of events. The production of occasional pamphlets did not require the same sort of all-absorbing professional commitment that periodical journalism demanded: the authors of pamphlet texts often included major actors in events, and first-rate writers and thinkers such as Vol­ taire or Condorcet who would not have tied themselves down to the routines of regular publication. In a world in which political events occurred irregularly, the flexible pamphlet was in some senses better adapted to serve as a vehicle of political opinion than the newspaper or magazine. It has sometimes been asserted that the distinction between pam­ phlets and newspapers before the French Revolution was that the for­ mer conveyed opinions and the latter were restricted to providing infor­ mation. This distinction is not entirely valid: some newspapers, like the Gazette de Leyde, had unmistakable political viewpoints, whereas pam­ phletjournalism could be informative as well as polemical. Nor is it true that pamphlets could completely escape censorship and other political controls to which periodicals were subject: in France, for example, most political pamphlets in fact circulated with a permission tacite, an oral permit from the police. The main advantage of the pamphlet was its flexibility: a pamphlet could be of any length, from a single page to over a thousand; it could be in any style, serious and factual, satirical, or emotional; and it could deal with any topic, whether it fitted into the gazettes' rather stereotyped categories for news or not. Thus a collection of pamphlets against the French minister Necker issued at the time of his disgrace in 1 78 1 in­ cludes dialogues, diatribes, collections of statistics, even suppositious speeches by Necker himself. Many of these pieces had clear political motivations, but some also constituted genuine investigative reporting of a sort never engaged in by the eighteenth-century periodical press. For example, a work titled Seconde Suite des observations du citoyen gave a detailed'if hostile summary of Necker's career from his humble origins to his rise to wealth during the Seven Years' War and his involvement in the complex affairs of the French India Company-all relevant infor­ mation for anyone seriously interested in understanding Necker's role in French public life. Other pamphlets provided serious if critical discus­ sions of the implications and probable consequences of Necker's pol­ icies.4 1 4 1 . Collection compltUt {sic] de /oW les ouvrages pour et coolTe M, Necker, avec des notes critiques, politiques et secretes (Utrecht: n.p., 1 78 1 ).

The Eighteenth-Century European Press

[6 5 ]

Taken as a whole, the dozen or more pamphlets issued against Necker in 1 779-8 1 fulfilled most of the functions that were to be taken on by the periodical newspaper press in France after the Revolution. Their authors demonstrated all the abilities that would be required of postrev­ olutionary journalists, both in their ability to investigate and provide relevant facts and in their ability to marshal those facts for polemical purposes. Contemporaries had no doubt that the pamphlets had a very real effect on events, and that they contributed considerably to the pressures leading to Necker's dismissal in 1 78 1 . Like the newspapers during and after the French Revolution, the anti-Necker pamphlets emanated from the minister's personal and political enemies and repre­ sented alternative ideas about how policy should be conducted.42 What the pamphleteers lacked, of course, was the ability to issue their journalism in periodical form. The French pamphlets against Necker and other similar libelles of the period, both in France and elsewhere, circulated semiclandestinely, even though their authors and distributors were rarely subject to serious penalties. An organized public dialogue between Necker's supporters and opponents was out of the question, although pamphlets frequently were written explicitly to answer other pamphlets: in the Necker collection just cited, a work titled us comments was a response and commentary to Necker's own Compte rendu. But the sporadic and irregular way in which pamphlets appeared and circulated saddled the genre with certain weaknesses. If the pamphlet'S irregular appearance allowed it to mold itself more closely to the episodic nature of eighteenth-century political life, it also made it impossible for pam­ phleteers to establish a durable bond with their readership. They had no chance to build up a track record of credibility that would extend from one issue to another. As it happens, the author of several of the major pamphlets against Necker was also the anonymous author of the most successful pamphlet series against Maupeou published during the crisis of 1 77 1 -74: J. M. Augeard had produced the celebrated Correspondance secrete etfamiliere de M. de Maupeou avec M. de Sor*** Conseiller du nouveau Parlement, a heavy-handed satire which had kept the Maupeou regime's police busy and resulted in the largest trial for press offenses in eigh­ teenth-century France.43 But Augeard conducted his offensive against Necker as an entirely separate project, with no reference to his earlier 42. On the background of the most effective anti-Necker pamphlets, see J. M. Augeard, Mimoires secreLs de). M. Augiard, Evariste Bavoux, ed. (Paris: H. PIon, 1 866), 98- 1 07. See also Jeremy D. Popkin, "Pamphlet Journalism at the End of the Old Regime," in Eigh­ teenth-Century Studies (forthcoming 1 989). 4�' Augeard, Mimoires, 45, 65 · In January 1 774, the "reformed" Parlement de Paris, loyal to Maupeou, condemned no less than forty-nine individuals for complicity in writing and distributing the Correspondance and another serial pamphlet against the embattled chancellor.

[66]

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

publications. Only the arrest of his faithful collaborator Pierre-Jacques Le Maitre in 1 786 exposed the workings of a pamphleteering operation that had extended over fifteen years.44 This absence of continuity made the pamphlet press a weak tool for the organization and coordination of public response to the news. A successful pamphlet might have great impact, but, as one of the most thoughtful journalists of the revolutionary period noted, the periodical could reach more readers "every day, at the same moment . . . in all classes of society . . . ; being the almost indispensable basis for each day's conversation, not only do they affect a larger body of people, but their impact is stronger than that of any other type of printed matter."45 The pamphlet was quickly outdistanced by the movement of events, whereas the newspaper could react, adjust its position, or shift its attention to new issues. Furthermore, the periodical had the chance to make its point more powerfully, thanks to the effect of repetition. Linguet, the master polemicist of the prerevolutionary period, underlined this in his re­ sponse to a reader who complained that he returned to the same subject too often. Referring to his long campaign against the philosophe d' Alembert, Linguet asserted that "this success has been due to con­ tinual repetition : a moment of silence [from me] would put M. d'Alem­ bert back on his pedestal, and the public would relapse into veneration, or at least into uncertainty. "46 The strength of the periodical was the fact that its influence continued over time. In this way, it also provided a bond among its readers, who regularly received the same message at the same time, and whose reactions were thus coordinated. These distinctions, and the advantages they gave to periodicals over irregular pamphlet publications, became obvious in France during the revolutionary era, but the same processes were at work even before 1 789. They account for the durable influence of even soft-spoken peri­ odicals, such as the Gazette de Leyde, despite the fact that on every issue that the paper covered, pamphlets circulated that were more outspoken, more completely informed, and frequently more interesting. For all its importance in eighteenth-century public life, the pamphlet press did not render the gazettes superfluous, nor did it necessarily exercise greater influence over events. 44. On the Le Maitre case, which rivaled the trial of Cardinal de Rohan in the French press for several months in early 1 786. see Andre Doyon, Un agent royalisre pendant fa Revolution: Pierre-Jacqun I.e Maitre (1 790-1 795) (Paris: Societe des etudes robespierristes, 1 969), and contemporary newsletters and newspapers, particularly N icolas H ardy, "Mes Loisirs," BN, Ms. fro 6685, entries for 14 Dec. 1 785, 19 Dec. 1 785, 30 Dec. 1 785, and 1 5 Jan. 1 786. 45. Pierre-Louis Roederer, "Essai analytique sur les diverses moyens etablis pour la communication des pensees, entre les hommes en societe," Journal d'economie publique, 30 brumaire, An V ( 1 796). 429. 46. Annales politiques , 6 : 39 1 .

The Eighteenth-Century European Press When one takes into account the full range of written media that carried political news in the last decades of the Old Regime, it becomes clear that the international gazettes occupied a liminal position between the official press and the newsletters and pamphlets that were normally tolerated but not officially acknowledged. State authorities were willing to acknowledge the existence of such papers as the Gazette de Leyde and they even referred to them as legitimate sources of information, which was not the case for the secret correspondences and libelles, even though both genres circulated freely among political elites. The international gazettes could publish some news and documents that exceeded the officially sanctioned picture of political reality, because what they printed did not officially commit the governments that allowed them to circulate. They could leave the safe shore of official reality, but they could not venture into the deep waters that only the semiclandestine media could explore. Newspaper editors were aware of those bound­ aries. They were among the people most likely to have access to even the most seditious pamphlet publications, even though they knew they could rarely make use of that material. Etienne Luzac, during his strug­ gle with the authoritarian Maupeou-d'Aiguillon government in France in the early 1 770s, sought to defend his right to print news that went beyond what was in the official French newspapers by listing the clan­ destine antiministerial pamphlets that he had received but had been careful not to mention in his gazette.47 The significance of the interna­ tional gazettes, and especially of the most distinguished representative of the genre, the Gazette de Leyde, was that its content marked the exact limit to which the pressure of reader demand and political necessity had been able to extend the official picture of reality. The gap between the news that appeared in the Gazette de France and what appeared in the Gazette de Leyde was the measure of the success of public opinion in wresting control over political information from Europe's governments. 47. Etienne Luzac to Desnoyers, 5 July 1 77 2 . in LGA-VH . Z( I ). no. 3 4 .

Making News in the Eighteenth Century

An eighteenth-century Italian engraving shows the offices of a Florentine gazette contemporary with the Gazette de Leyde, the Notizie del mondo. Dressed in wigs and knee-breeches, going over their copy with quill pens, the editors seem to have little in common with their twen­ tieth-century journal.istic descendants. But the excitement with which the two men on the left are perusing the bulletins that have just come in and the evident haste with which the seated editors are marking up copy for the printers in the background indicate that some aspects of the news business have not changed. Twice a week, for almost thirty years, Jean Luzac sat at his desk in Leiden and, like his contemporaries in Florence, selected the news reports and documents to make up the next issue of his Gazette de Leyde. As he sorted through the manuscript bulletins from his correspondents and the newspapers and pamphlets he collected from all over the world, he was composing a picture of political reality for his readers. It had to be a picture comprehensive and convincing enough to maintain his niche in the highly competitive European news market. That picture also had to be acceptable to the governments that controlled the flow of news and the distribution of newspapers on the continent, to ensure that the Gazette de Leyde would be able to circulate freely. Luzac's choice of news items was influenced not only by commercial and political concerns function but also by his own background and character. He brought the same seriousness of purpose and passionate commitment to his journalistic work that he did to every other aspect of his life. In a letter to a friend who had praised his paper, Luzac ex­ pressed his feelings about the importance of what he did : [68]

Making News in the Eighteenth Century

[ 69]

No one perceives better than I the shortcomings of this genre of publica­ tion-defects, unfortunately, that cannot be remedied, in part because of the necessity of appearing at fixed intervals, and limiting oneself to a fixed amount of space, [and] in part because of the public's demand to always have something new, however uncertain and unconfirmed it may be, rather than to allow one to use such a collection to insert items and documents worthy of being preserved that one did not have place for at the proper time. But after all, finding myself called to this task, I have done what I could to lift it above the contempt to which the bad taste, the ignorance, and the bad behavior of so many chroniclers have condemned it, in order to make it as useful as possible to my contemporaries. 1

For Luzac, the journalistic profession was a moral calling. In accom­ plishing what modem sociologists would call his "news work," he strove to satisfy two imperatives.2 One was to give the news as fully as possible, without favoring any one party, thereby fulfilling his function as a "mere reporter."3 Luzac took pains to underline the fact that he invariably documented both sides of controversial issues, even when he had good reason to believe that his readers were largely of one opinion. Public reference to his professional obligation of impartiality protected him against complaints from both subscribers and authorities. But Luzac also selected his news in accordance with a second moral principle, articulated in one of his many letters responding to diplomatic com­ plaints about his paper's content. As he so often said in the paper itself, Luzac asserted that he tried to be impartial. "But I do not at all believe," he continued, "that this impartiality consists of a cold indifference be­ tween good and evil. My idea of impartiality is that it means to judge without personal motives, unaffected by either friendship or enmity, and to acknowledge one's position. If one had to speak of good and evil, of vice and virtue, in the same tone, the profession of reporter, as well as that of historian, would be very difficult . . . for a frank and honest writer."4 Confident that he was not swayed by selfish private motives, and that he rigorously followed his journalistic obligation to present the public statements of all parties in the controversies he reported, Luzac was untroubled by the doubts that have assailed modem journalists who have come to question the possibility of eliminating subjective biases J . Luzac to unidentified correspondent, probably A. Caillard, n.d. but 1 785-87, in LUL, Luzac, carton 28, no. 6g. 2. Two particularly influential studies employing this concept are Gaye Tuchman, Making News (New York: Free Press, 1 978), and Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1 980). 3 . GL, 1 7 Mar. 1 789 ( Hamburg, 6 Mar.). 4. Luzac to Hertzberg, Prussian foreign minister, 2 1 Mar. 1 783, in LGA-V H , Z(2), no. 54 ·

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

The editorial office and printing shop of the Notizie del mondo, Florence, 1 769. Courtesy of Prof. Franco Venturi and Giulio Einaudi Editore.

Making News in the Eighteenth Century from the news.5 He saw no contradiction between objective news cover­ age and strong personal commitment.

Collecting the News The first task of the eighteenth-century newsman was to collect a variety of information about potentially newsworthy events in the world around him. Jean Luzac had access to professional correspondents and newsletters, material from diplomatic and political contacts, items from other newspapers, and stories sent in by interested private parties. His paper's reputation as Europe's premier source of news depended on his success in using these sources. Because of slow communications, Luzac had far fewer information-gathering possibilities than his modern suc­ cessors. Nor could he verify the information he received by cross-check­ ing with other observers at the scene of distant happenings. And the scanty financial resources available to a publication whose printing tech­ nology limited its circulation and therefore its overall income prevented him from guaranteeing the authenticity of his reports by relying solely on employees paid primarily for their services to his paper. This reliance on its own paid correspondents was the basis of the nineteenth-century London Times's superiority, but it was able to adopt such a policy because it had mechanized printing presses that allowed a circulation and there­ fore an income several orders of magnitude higher than that of any eighteenth-century news publication. 6 By comparison with "news­ papers of record" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Gazette tk Leyde's news-gathering operation was modest in size and held together by the journalistic equivalent of spit and baling wire, but it was the best that could be done in Luzac's day. An eighteenth-century newspaper's reputation depended above all on the quality of its network of paid correspondents. Unlike modern professional reporters, the Gazette de Leyde's correspondents were not full-time paid members of the paper's staff. They were often engaged in other activities as well, and were paid a regular sum in exchange for providing a dependable account of news in their vicinity. Even though his correspondents were rarely full-time newsmen, they were still expen­ sive, and Luzac could only afford to hire permanent correspondents in locations where he could be sure there would be a regular flow of news. How many of these Luzac employed at any one time is not known. He probably had at least as many as the best Dutch-language news gazette, 5. See the discussion in Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic

Books , 1 978), esp. 1 59.

6. Stanley Morison et aI. , History of the 'Timts" (New York: Macmillan, 1 935-53), 2 : 89.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution the Ofrrechte Haarlemsche Courant, which had employed eight foreign correspondents in 1 738-42 , several of whom worked simultaneously for Luzac's uncle Etienne, then the editor of the Gazette de u,de. 7 During the 1 770S and 1 780s, the content of the gazette makes it clear that it received regular information from London, Paris, Brussels, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Constantinople. When circumstances required, Luzac employed temporary correspondents elsewhere. But the paper could not afford to expand its payroll indefi­ nitely, particularly because the limitations imposed by the printing pro­ cess made it impossible to use lengthy news bulletins from more than two or three locations in each issue. Only a handful of the paper's correspondents can be identified. The best documented of the paper's paid correspondents was its man in Paris from 1 78 1 to 1 789, Pascal Boyer, a good example of the eighteenth­ century reporter or buUetiniste. "A big, husky fellow," according to a French revolutionary police report, Boyer had been born in Tarascon in southern France in 1 74 1 or 1 74 2 .8 By the 1 77os, he was part of the milieu of diplomatic agents and gossip-collectors on the fringe of French politics,9 and in 1 776 he became the Paris correspondent of the newly established Coumer de l'Europe. In 1 780, however. the Coumer de l'Europe dismissed him; soon afterward he was arrested in a roundup of bul­ letinistes in January 1 78 1 , and spent ten days in the Bastille. After Boyer was released, however, a period source tells us that the comte de Ver­ gennes "sought to console him for this mistake, by giving him the greatest opportunities to increase the distribution of his correspondence and his contacts abroad." J 0 Among those opportunities, apparently, was the job of Paris correspondent for the Gazette de u,de. Boyer obviously had promised that the government would have no reason to worry about his newsletters, and Vergennes, for his part, had pursued a policy of tolerating the activities of known bulletinistes rather than having to chase down newcomers who might be even less amenable to reasonable persuasion. J J According to the Memoires secrets, Boyer also 7. D. H. Couvee, "The Administration of the 'Oprechte Haarlemse Courant' 1 738-42"

Gautte 4 ( 1 958), 1 03-4.

8. Dossier in AN, f'1 46 1 5, d. 2. At the time of his arrest in 1 794 , Boyer was married and had two adult children. 9. The classic description of this milieu remains Frantz Funck-Brentano, us nouvell­ istes, 2d ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1 905)' 1 0. Frantz Funck-Brentano, uttres de Cachet (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1 903), 406. Vergennes's role in freeing Boyer is confirmed in the minister's letter of 8 Feb. 1 78 1 , to La Vauguyon, the French ambassador in The Hague, in MAE, Corr. Pol.-Hollande, 543. 1 1 . In 1 78 2 , Vergennes ordered the lieutenant of police Jean-Charles-Pierre Le Noir to release a certain Charles Fouilhoux, Paris correspondent of the Gautte d'Utrecht and the Brussels French-language paper, on these grounds. Vergennes added that "his con­ fession, . . . and the appearance of his having acted more from imprudence than from evil intent, have led us to treat him with indulgence." Cited in W. P. Sautijn Kluit, "Hol­ landsche en Fransche Utrechtse Couranten," 1 06.

Making News in the Eighteenth Century tried to supplement his income as a nouvelliste by setting up "a political Museum, or club in the English manner" in 1 78 2 . His intended clientele consisted of rich gentlemen who wanted a place to read the newspapers and discuss politics without having to rub elbows with the hoi polloi in the cafes or the reading rooms of the Palais-Royal. Boyer had supposedly obtained government approval for his enterprise "on condition that there will be no discussion of government or religion, and that women will not be admitted." The Gazette de Leyde's correspondent was thus an experienced newsman, with good social contacts, but he was also a man whose enterprises were dependent on the favor of the French govern­ ment. Boyer's subservience to the French authorities did not bother Jean Luzac; when his shipments to France were temporarily blocked in 1 785, Luzac reminded the French ambassador in the Hague that he "employed only correspondents who are not without the approval of the government," and "kept out of our papers all articles that reach us from more suspect sources." 1 2 Despite this dependence on the French authorities, Boyer proved himself to be an extremely able reporter. He provided the paper with a full and accurate narrative of the major events of Calonne's ministry, the sensational Diamond Necklace affair, the convening of the first Assem­ bly of Notables in 1 787, and all the other events leading up to the summoning of the Estates-General. Comparison with other press or­ gans of the period establishes without any doubt that Boyer's reports in the Gazette de Leyde were the best publicly published reporting on French affairs available at the time. Boyer produced a lengthy newsletter in time for the mail coach twice a week; many of his dispatches recount events that occurred the afternoon before they were written, so we know that he often worked late into the night. During the day, he may occasionally have participated in the regular exchanges among nouvellistes that took place in various cafes and public parks , l 3 but it would be a mistake to imagine that Boyer relied very heavily on this kind of political gossip in drafting his newsletters. His employer in Leiden wanted verifiable facts, not free-floating rumors, and his mentors in the Foreign Ministry would not have tolerated his forwarding a mass of information, accurate or not, from uncontrolled sources. His life had its dangers : when the French government was aroused, it could ensure that "nothing is harder and more dangerous than to report political news and novelties from here, notwithstanding the fact that one can easily hear them being discussed in all coffeehouses, societies and public places," as the correspondent of 1 2 . [Pidansat de Mairobert, attrib.] Mimoirts secrets, 20: 1 54, 1 56 ( 1 and 4 Apr. 1 78 2 ) ; Jean a n d Etienne Luzac t o marquis d e Verac, French ambassador t o the Netherlands, 1 0 Mar. 1 785, in MAE, COIT. Pol.-Hollande, 562 . 1 3. He hgures as a participant in the fictional dialogues about the Anglo-French naval conflict after 1 778 that appear in volumes 9 and 10 of [Pidansat de Mairobert, attrib.] ,

L'esp;on anglois.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution a German periodical noted in 1 78 1 . 14 Despite these perils, however, Boyer was not a scribbler scrambling to survive. He moved easily among the powerful whose activities he chronicled. Boyer's main sources were undoubtedly members of the royal bu­ reaucracy and of certain key political institutions who furnished him with news on a regular basis; like modern reporters, he frequented government institutions that generated news themselves and also assem­ bled information from scattered sources for their own benefit. 1 5 There is no other way he could have obtained and continued to publish his detailed internal reports on the Parlement de Paris, for example, unless he had been in touch with a member of that body. And it was certainly a high-ranking court figure who gave him and other European journalists the ostensible transcript of the conversation in which Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette accused Cardinal de Rohan in the Diamond Necklace affair-a conversation heard by only "six persons in all, constituting the highest council in the land." 16 From Luzac's point of view, the only drawback was that Boyer's corre­ spondence was not exclusive: his newsletters also appeared regularly in the Leiden paper's archrival, the Courier du Bas-Rhin. 1 7 How Boyer managed to make the two hostile editors, Jean Luzac and Jean Manzon, accept this situation is not clear: perhaps the French government facili­ tated the circulation of these two papers and offered them a wider range of information from official sources in exchange for their agreeing to share the Foreign Ministry'S preferred bulletiniste, or it may be that Luzac and Manzon tacitly agreed to use the same correspondent because they could share the cost of paying him and thereby save money. The activities of newspaper correspondents outside of the great capi­ tals took a somewhat different form. Many of them were stationed not at the scene of major events but at a key crossroads where travelers from capitals or battlefronts would pass through ; their function was to collect 14. PolitischeJoornal, Apr. 1 7 8 1 , 39 1 -92. The article refers specifically to the arrest of Boyer, at that point still working for the Coomer de l'Europe. 1 5. See the analysis of American reponers' news-gathering practices in Fishman, Man­ ufacturing the News, 45-5 1 , and the general discussion in Bernard Roshco, NewSfflng lllci (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 97 5 ) , 23, 1 1 6 . 1 6. Frances Mossiker, The Queen's Necklace (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1 96 1 ), 272. This text appeared in numerous European newspapers, including the Gazette de Cologne, 2 Sept. 1 785, and the Hamburg Correspondent, 3 1 Aug. 1 785. 1 7 . This fact makes it possible to be cenain that the texts on France published in the Gazette de Leyde were composed primarily in Paris and not in Leiden. Neither paper was simply copying from the other, because in some instances each had a given story before the other printed it. I have verified regular duplication of material in the two papers from January 1 786 to July 1 789, but there is no reason to doubt that the practice had begun earlier. Some attentive readers were aware of the duplication at the time; Dumont-Pigalle mentioned it in his notes on Manzon (AR, DP, canon 48). On the basis of a few random comparisons, it seems possible that the French news in the leading German newspaper of the period, the Hamburg Correspondent, also came from this source, but the fact that its stories appeared in German makes it more difficult to establish precise duplication.

Making News in the Eighteenth Century information about events from elsewhere and forward it to Leiden. Hamburg was a key listening post for news from the Baltic states; in the mid- 1 790s, Luzac paid his correspondent there between 1 50 and 250 gulden every three months for his services. I S The correspondent Luzac engaged in Boston in 1 782 was to gather news from the whole of the North American continent, largely by reading the American news­ papers. 19 Professional correspondents were vital to the GazeUe de Leyde's news­ gathering activities, and they produced a substantial portion of the paper's content: the unidentified London correspondent and Boyer together furnished close to half the paper's news for most of the 1 780s. But correspondents of this sort were not able to satisfy the paper's need for information by themselves. Almost equally important to Luzac were the sources of information he was able to cultivate among the continent's diplomatic agents, military officers, and major political figures. Govern­ ments maintained information-gathering networks vastly larger than what any private journalistic enterprise could afford.20 Journalists natu­ rally sought to take advantage of these networks, either by covertly obtaining information from embassy staffs and army officers eager to supplement their often meager stipends-sometimes by furnishing in­ formation their governments would have preferred to keep secret-or by cultivating contacts with officials who were willing to share such information to further their government's policies. Indeed, journalists expected governments to supply them with information about wars and other public affairs: when the Russian government refused to give out bulletins about the campaign against Turkey in 1 788, the Mercure de France made a public complaint.2 1 One o f the most important o f these liaisons was the paper's "Polish

connection." In the two periods when the GazeUe de Leyde distinguished itself by detailed coverage of affairs in the Polish kingdom, it apparently did not have a paid correspondent chosen by the editor: the best part of its information came through intermediaries chosen by those partici­ pants in Polish politics, most notably King Stanislas-August, who wanted to see their views supported in the paper.22 For news from America, 1 8. Jean Luzac to Baudus, Hamburg correspondent, n.d. but 1 795, in LUL, Luzac, carton 28, no. 4 1 . 1 9. [Benjamin Gerrish] to Jean Luzac, Boston, 2 3 Nov. 1 782, i n Huntington Library (San Marino, Calif.), Rufus King collection, RK 485. 20. On the French diplomatic information network, see us alfaires etTangeres et Ie corps diplomatique frant;ais, 2 vols. (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1 984), 1 : 204- 14. 2 l .Joumal de Bruxelles (news supplement of Mercure de France), 1 9July 1 788 (Frankfurt, 5 July). 22. Jerzy Lojek, "International French Newspapers and Their Role in Polish Affairs during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century," East Central Europe ( 1 974), 58-59, 6 1 . I t is not always clear that Luzac knew the identity of his Polish sources. One letter from

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution Luzac depended heavily on the American representatives in Europe. Early in the course of the colonies' struggle, Luzac came in contact with Charles Dumas, the dedicated Dutch representative of the American cause in The Hague, who told Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane in early 1 777 that Luzac had "inserted in his papers several small articles that I sent him, and he would print more if I could furnish them . . . I would strongly advise you, Gentlemen, to take advantage of his good will, in giving me what he needs (but more facts than political argu­ ments)."2S Dumas continued to send Luzac information until at least 1 79 1 , including such important pieces as the official text of the treaty between the United States and France. During this period, Luzac also received materials directly from such distinguished sources as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Luzac also received official information directly from the French government before the Revolution. His personal papers contain an extensive series of letters from Antoine-Bernard Caillard, the secretary of the French embassy in the Hague from 1 786 to 1 789. The two men were friends and Luzac did various small favors for Caillard in Leiden, such as examining copies of rare books that the French representative, an ardent bibliophile, was considering buying. From time to time, Cait­ lard forwarded short notes concerning French foreign policy, which Luzac invariably transcribed into the paper. In March 1 787, for exam­ ple, Caillard ask�d Luzac to reassure the public that the death of the comte de Vergennes would not mean any change in French policy. The requested article appeared just four days after Caillard wrote his let­ ter. 24 By successful recruitment of able correspondents and personal con­ tacts with soldiers and diplomats, Luzac was often able to obtain infor­ mation in advance of other news publications. But he could not afford to keep correspondents everywhere, nOT could he depend on friendly diplomats and government officials to make keeping him informed their top priority. He therefore had to rely extensively on other newspapers, public sources that were equally available to his competitors. Eigh­ teenth-century newspaper editors used each other's products as a form of news service, copying freely to fill up their own columns, and many of Stanislas-August to an intermediary who forwarded materials to the Gazette de Leydt specifically instructs the king'! agent to conceal the source of his information. Stanislas­ August to Filippo Mazzei, 4 Apr. 1 789, in LeUres de Philippe Mazzei et du roi St4nislas-August de Pologne (Rome: Istituto storico italiano, 1 982), 2 2 2 . 23. Dumas to Franklin and Deane, I I March 1 777, i n AR, Dumas, canon 1 . 24. Caillard to Luzac, 23 Mar. 1 787, in LUL, Luzac, canon 29; anicle in GL, 27 Mar. 1 787. Caillard, born in France in 1 737, had begun his bureaucratic career as an assistant of Turgot's during the latter's intendance in Limoges. He subsequently held a number of diplomatic posts before and during the Revolution. J. Balteau, M. Barroux, and M. Prevost, eds. , Dictionnaire de biographie fra1l{tlise (Paris: Letouzey and Ane, 1 933-).

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them, particularly the editors of provincial papers, had no other sources for distant news at all. The Gautte de Leyde relied much less on scissors and paste than these lesser journals: it could hardly fulfill its claim to special status as Europe's best-informed journal on the basis of articles that had appeared first in other publications. But these reports were often the first indication the paper received of events in distant places. Responding to a diplomatic complaint from Copenhagen, Etienne Luzac asserted that his first reports on the overthrow of the Danish minister Johann Friedrich Struensee in 1 772 had been constructed entirely from materials already published in the Dutch-language ga­ zettes, because he had been unable to obtain any information directly. 25 Newspapers from distant locations were often the Leiden paper's source for documents of political importance, such as many of the materials about American affairs Jean Luzac inserted during the War of Indepen­ dence. Many eighteenth-century newspapers also relied heavily on letters volunteered by amateur correspondents in whose vicinity something newsworthy had happened. These correspondents were the lifeblood of the English provincial papers: a printer could easily fill his columns with their colorful accounts of local festivals, crimes, and hangings. But Jean Luzac made little use of such unsolicited information, because his "newspaper of record" could not afford to vouch for the authenticity of such reports. Of the major stories the paper dealt with during Luzac's editorship, the only one for which he appears to have relied primarily on such volunteered letters was the Geneva revolt of 1 78 1 -8 2 . Luzac men­ tioned in the paper the extraordinary volume of mail he had received concerning this outbreak of dissension. 26 He printed a number of sharply conflicting accounts reflecting the different viewpoints of the contending parties, although he made his own distaste for the rebels quite clear. His difficulty was that he could not secure a Genevan news source equivalent to those he had found for the affairs of other coun­ tries: a small city-state did not have the bureaucratic machine of the French or even the fledgling American government. In general, the Gautte de Leyde seems to have avoided relying on ordinary readers' letters as sources of news. Its notion ofjournalistic responsibility did not yet require that it print only information obtained and verified by its . own personnel, but it did rule out reports from individuals without some sort of "public character" that the paper could verify. Luzac did, of course, borrow from other newspapers, but when he had doubts about their information, he satisfied himself by indicating his source and thus transferring the responsibility for the report's accuracy. 25. Letter of March 1 77 2 , in LGA-VH . Z( I ). no. 33. 26. GL. 5 July 1 782 (Leiden. 4 July) .

News and Politics in the Age of Revolu tion

News Cate gories As he sorted through the correspondents' letters, insiders' informa­ tion , and out-of-town newspapers that arrived with each mail coach, Jean Luzac looked for news that fitted into specific categories. The types of events that he found newsworthy were the classic categories of public information of all major European newspapers of the period : wars, diplomatic negotiations, domestic high politics in major states, constitu­ tional crises-in the eighteenth-century sense of the term-and major outbreaks of social violence. N otably absent from the Gazette de Leyde was any trace of the "human interest" story so characteristic of modern journalism, as well as the variety of essays, literary news, poems, theater reviews , sports reports, and miscellaneous items common in the London dailies, the magazines, and some provincial newspapers. There was a lively interest in such subjects on the continent, as the success of such publications as the

Memoires secrets

and the

Causes celebres ,

a publication

devoted to sensational trials, demonstrated, but the Gazette de Leyde consciously chose to ignore them. 2 7 As the editors of the Memoires secrets commented, "The gazettes . . . are strictly the theater of sovereigns," from which the history of the private individuals who made u p civil society was excluded . 28 If one of the characteristics of the elite press in general is a concentration on international relations and politics, then the

Gazette de Leyde carried this tendency to an extreme, even compared

with the other newspapers of its time. Wars were Jean Luzac's most urgent concern . Wherever armies marched and warships set sail , he scrambled to record their activities. The priority the paper assigned to this task was shared by most of the other newspapers of the period . 29 Luzac tried to obtain news from all the belligerent powers in any conflict, including Spain and other states that were otherwise rarely mentioned in the paper. War news took precedence over all other matters : as the paper's Paris correspondent wrote after the French declaration of war in April

1 792 , "From now until

the peace , the operations of the National Assembly will receive much less attention than those of the army."30 This war news was not orga­ nized in an attempt to reconcile the different versions of events obtained from the combatants : readers were left to puzzle out the truth for themselves from the welter of conflicting reports . Although the paper's coverage of military events was usually even27. On the various eighteenth-century publications of this genre, see Hans-Jurgen Lusebrink, KriminalitiU und Literatur im FranJrreich des 1 8. Jahrhunderts (Munich and Vienna: R. Oldenbourg, 1 983), 1 04-72 . 28. [Pidansat d e Mairobert, attrib.l, Mimoires secrets , 2 5 : 6 . 2 9 . See the articles o n war news i n Paule Jansen et aI. , L'annee 1 7 78 a travers La ,"esse /Tame par ordinateur (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1 982). 30. GL, 1 May 1 792 (Paris, 2 2 April).

Making News in the Eighteenth Century

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handed, Luzac never restricted himself entirely to official sources if he could help it. As he explained in answering Russian complaints about his use of unofficial sources during the Russo-Turkish war in 1 788, official bulletins often arrived too late: he could not make his impatient readers wait that long for information.3 1 Furthermore, unofficial reports often supplied much interesting information that the official bulletins omit­ ted. The disastrous opening of the Austrian army's campaign against the Turks in 1 787 was an extreme example: the Viennese court refused to issue any official acknowledgment of the humiliating failure of its attack on Belgrade, forcing the paper's Vienna correspondent to choose among competing unauthorized versions furnished by officers in the Austrian army. 32 The paper's war stories, often written by military professionals, were addressed to an audience with some sophistication in military matters. A lengthy article on George Washington'S defeat at Kingsbridge in 1 776, based on two letters from English officers and a variety of English press accounts, gave a careful technical reconstruction of the action, with many references to what one could learn by plotting the events on a map;33 indeed, the paper often advertised special maps for readers who wanted to follow war news.34 When there was no real action to report, the paper risked losing its readers. An editorial comment on the stale­ mated War of the Bavarian Succession in 1 778 tried to mollify the public by claiming that "connoisseurs" would admire "the art with which the talented generals on both sides seek to gain advantages of terrain, while avoiding exposing themselves to a battle whose success could not be assured."35 The battle reports for which readers waited so eagerly tended to be extremely dry catalogues of the units involved and the posts taken. This was particularly true of the wars fought before 1 79 2 , when armed combat was essentially an affair for professionals and when the only wars on the continent were taking place in central and eastern Europe, hindering the paper's news gathering. The outbreak of the war between revolutionary France and the other European powers in that year gave rise to war coverage of a new sort: it was more voluminous and often more emotional, as Luzac sought to describe "a war that the most violent, we may even say the most atrocious, passions on both sides have set off. "36 3 1 . Ibid 29 July 1 788 (Leiden. 29 July). 32. Ibid., 1 Jan. 1 788 (Vienna. 15 Dec. 1 787). When the Austrian government finally cracked down on these unauthorized correspondents. the paper had virtually to abandon the story. Ibid 23 Sept. 1 788 (Vienna, 6 Sept.). 33. Ibid., 3 Jan. 1 777 (Leiden. n.d.). 34. The issue of 12 Aug. 1 788 contains a typical example of this sort of advertising. It offered a map of the Crimea and surrounding territories in which the Russo-Turkish war was being fought. 35 · GL, 1 5 Sept. 1 778 (Leiden, 1 3 Sept.). 36. Ibid., 9 Oct. 1 792 (Leiden, 7 Oct.). .•

.•

[80]

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

The paper also concerned itself with major diplomatic negotiations. Unlike the beginning of the 1 700S or the period after Napoleon's defeat, the late eighteenth century was not an age of great diplomatic con­ gresses in which the fate of the continent was decided, and at which journalists could obtain a rich harvest of rumors and leaks for their papers. The negotiations Luzac had to record were normally bilateral, but their consequences often affected all of Europe. As in the case of wars, the paper usually succeeded in obtaining information from both sides. Whereas military operations were essentially public events that might be witnessed by outsiders, diplomatic negotiations generally took place in secrecy, and the Gazette de Leyde was dependent on what in­ formed participants chose to tell it. In no other aspect of its news coverage did it have so much difficulty in establishing the reliability of the information it published. Luzac solicited news by keeping up close contacts with the diplomatic corps in The Hague.37 He followed a consistent policy to confirm the accuracy of the unauthenticated diplo­ matic documents he published: he normally announced the impending publication of major documents one issue in advance, as he told one complaining ambassador, "with the intention of discovering whether there is any objection to their insertion." If none of the foreign envoys in The Hague complained, he considered himself entitled to proceed.38 The public signs of diplomatic activity that the paper's correspon­ dents were able to observe were usually limited to the arrival and depar­ ture of representatives and to public ceremonies; beyond that, their dispatches consisted of a swirl of rumors and deductions. Verification came from the course of events unless the paper could obtain the actual texts of treaties, documents that it generally succeeded in publishing thanks to leaks from one party or another, usually long after the event. Thus the paper correctly reported the existence of a Franco-American treaty, signed in December 1 777, on 1 7 March 1 778,39 but was unable to give the text of the agreement until it obtained it from an American source nearly a year later.4o In the meantime, of course, the outbreak of hostilities between England and France had served to confirm the pa­ per's initial report. The paper was well aware that most of the information it received about diplomatic negotiations was leaked by parties who believed that it 37. In 1 789, he was able to supply a Paris correspondent with detailed notes about each of the nine accredited ambassadors in residence there. Jean Luzac to Johan Valckenaer, 7 July 1 789, in LUL, Ms. BPL 1 030. The notes on the ambassadors were for transmission to an unnamed French official, possibly a prospective French ambassador to the Nether­ lands. 38. Jean Luzac to Baron de Reischack, n.d. but 1 774. in LGA-VH , Z( I ). no. 36. 39. GL. 1 7 Mar. 1 778 (Paris, 9 Mar.). 40. Ibid 1 9 Feb. 1 779 (n.d but crediting the PTovidenct [R.I.] Gautte of 1 9 Dec. 1 778). .•

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Making News in the Eighteenth Century

[8 1 ]

was to their advantage to publicize something. After giving readers two different versions of the Russo-Turkish peace agreement of 1 790, nei­ ther of which it could confirm, Luzac noted, "It appears that there are Courts, which, having obtained details of this treaty, have hastened to make them public, in order to damage the interests of one of the con­ tracting parties."4 1 But readers' interest in the outcome of negotiations and the paper's obligation to keep up with developing stories compelled the Gazette de Leyde to publish even uncertain information in this do­ main. As a result, the columns of the paper were a favored site for the release of trial balloons and the elaboration of diplomatic smokescreens. The paper's record of prophecy was hardly outstanding: if it correctly predicted French involvement in the American war as early as August 1 777-admittedly after having dismissed the possibility in April42 -it had overoptimistically reported a peaceful settlement of the Austro­ Prussian dispute over Bavaria, a story disproved when war broke out.43 Readers were subsequently able to verify that Joseph II and Catherine II's conference at Cherson in 1 787 did lead to both countries' attacking Turkey, as the paper had inferred at the time,44 but Luzac was reluctant to believe that Austria would come into open conflict with revolutionary France until just shortly before the war started in April 1 792. The fault on all these occasions, however, lay not in any lack of foresight on Luzac's part, but in the nature of the diplomatic process. It was fre­ quently to the participants' advantage to circulate misleading reports. Besides war and diplomacy, the Gazette de Leyde was concerned with certain kinds of domestic occurrences within European states. It faith­ fully recorded all changes in the political leadership of European powers, but with a keen sense of the relative importance of different categories of such shifts. More or less normal and predictable changes, such as the death of a monarch and the succession of an heir, were noticed but not dwelled on, even when the change of a ruler fore­ shadowed a significant change in policy. The paper disposed of the death of Louis XV, fraught with significance for the outcome of the Maupeou experiment in taming the parlements in France, in two succes­ sive issues. Frederic I I's death in 1 786 was the occasion for one of the paper's coups-it obtained the news before the French court did-but Frederic had been ill for some time and the paper did not linger over an event that it evidently regarded as being part of the ordinary course of things.45 4 1 . GL, 4 May 1 790 (Leiden, 2 May). 42 . Ibid., 18 Apr. 1 777 (Paris, 1 1 Apr.); 1 Aug. 1 777 (Leiden, 30 July). 43. Ibid., 30 Jan. 1 778 (Leiden, 28 Jan.). 44. Ibid., 3 Apr. 1 787 (Leiden, 1 Apr. 1 787). 45. Ibid., 25 Aug. 1 786 (Leiden, 24 Aug.). Luzac had been informed by a Hanoverian diplomat who had traveled directly from Berlin to the Netherlands.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution Changes in royal ministries often occupied the paper more than changes in rulers. Results of political decisions rather than of the acci­ dents of human mortality, these shifts were less predictable and often generated considerable speculation and anticipation before they hap­ pened. By concentrating on ministers instead of monarchs, the the Gazette de Leyde portrayed even the politics of absolutist states such as France as though such countries had a constitutional system in which the ministers mattered much more than the king. In general, the Gazette de Leyde treated the professional politicians and administrators who held ministerial rank as the prime movers in politics, and gave them the publicity that the court gazettes reserved for monarchs. Although ministers were unquestionably important people in the Gazette de Leyde's scheme of news values, the domestic political stories it reported at greatest length were those involving political assemblies of various sorts. These bodies generated extensive amounts of copy on a predictable basis. Britain was, of course, the model case, and reports of Parliament's debates were a staple of the paper's content for the half of every year during which that body was in session. In France, the paper treated the most important judicial body, the Parlement de Paris, as a Gallic equivalent to Westminster, thereby bolstering the judges' preten­ tions to be regarded as spokesmen for the French nation.46 The paper, and the European press in general, gave extensive and regular sum­ maries of the speeches in the Polish Diet during the two crisis periods of 1 772 to 1 774 and 1 788 to 1 792. As in its coverage of the British Parlia­ ment, the Gazette de Leyde identified parties and factions within the Diet, discussed their views, and indicated which side it favored. The paper's coverage of the revolutionary movements in the United Provinces and in the Austrian Netherlands in the 1 780s also involved extensive cover­ age of proceedings in a variety of provincial Estates and municipal councils in both countries. Even before the French Revolution, the Gazette de Leyde had made a clear decision to treat parliamentary talk about politics as newsworthy, and to elevate the status of assemblies at the expense of monarchs. The convening of the Estates-General in France in 1 789 compelled the Gazette de Leyde to devote a major share of its attention to a new locus of parlementary activity. Here, even more clearly than in the case of the British Parliament, was a talking shop that made news, and the National Assembly and its successors quickly outstripped all other assemblies in the space they received in the paper's columns. Whatever Luzac's reac­ tion to their doings, the French assemblies were in many respects a 46. In 1 786. when the Paris Parlement voted to acquit Cardinal de Rohan of charges stemming from the Diamond Necklace affair. the Gazette de Leydt even gave the roll call of the judges' votes. GL . 1 3 June 1 786 (Paris. 5 June).

Making News in the Eighteenth Century journalist's dream: continuously in session, unlike the British Parlia­ ment with its annual recesses, and almost continuously undertaking important acts, they provided a most dependable stream of copy. The difficulty was, however, that the French press quickly took over the function of publicizing these debates. The Gazette de Leyde, which had flourished by giving the most comprehensive French-language versions of the proceedings of assemblies all over the continent, could not main­ tain its monopoly over the French revolutionary legislatures, but neither could it afford to ignore them and thus throw the readers it was able to retain after 1 789 into the arms of its new Paris-based rivals. The result was an untenable journalistic situation for the paper. In this way as in so many others, the French Revolution brought changes that made the decline of the Leiden paper inevitable. In many cases, coverage of assemblies shaded over into coverage of another category of domestic political news: constitutional crises. These events captured the paper's earnest attention even more than the minis­ terial politics and the regular assembly proceedings already discussed. As in the case of wars, the paper was careful to cover all the significant disputes about constitutional authority that occurred in this period, ranging from the American Revolution to the disputes in Geneva. It rarely took sides explicitly, but it served the interests of the American colonists, the Irish Volunteers, the Dutch Patriots, and many other movements by publishing their manifestoes. From 1 75 1 on, the paper was one of the normal publicity outlets for the French parlements' remonstrances, ostensibly secret petitions to the king but in fact veritable political declarations. Luzac justified his publication of material about such domestic controversies, often technically clandestine, on the grounds of his duty to provide objective information. Where there was a dispute about political legitimacy, it was not his duty to take sides: "All that [a newspaper editor] can do in such cases is to report the news for and against [the government], insofar as he can obtain it," he told the Leiden city council in response to one foreign complaint.47 The Gazette de Leyde's attention to this sort of news left readers in no doubt that the paper viewed the fundamental constitution of any polity as the legiti­ mate concern of all of its citizens, not the exclusive property of its nominal sovereign. The Gazette de Leyde's coverage of popular violence constituted some­ thing of an exception to the usual run of its reportage. This was its only category of news in which the lower classes played a prominent role; it was also the category in which the paper went furthest in covering events that the controlled media within the major continental countries passed 4 7. Etienne and Jean Luzac to Leiden city council, response to Polish complaint, 25 Oct. 1 774. in LGA-VH. Z( I). no. 35.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution over in silence. Curiously, however, the paper's often detailed reporting of outbreaks of social violence was actually less subversive of the estab­ lished order in which the Gaz.eUe de Leyde operated than its extensive coverage of political crises or "revolutions" within established political institutions. The Gazette de Leyde was not in the least squeamish about covering these stories. Like the outbreak of wars or the occurrence of floods, popular uprisings were part of the natural history of society, and the paper covered them in a matter-of-fact tone devoid of panic or moral condemnation. To be sure, it was often unable to obtain prompt and reliable information. The great Pugachev insurrection in the distant interior of Russia reached the paper only in the form of terse and confusing summaries of rumors circulating in St. Petersburg. On 2 1 June 1 774, readers learned of the rebellion in a short paragraph in­ cluded in a story on the war in the Crimea, together with a later dispatch reporting the public celebration in Moscow of a victory over Pugachev's followers. A week later they discovered that Emelian Pugachev was still at large; on 9 September 1 774 the paper suddenly informed them that the rebels were threatening Moscow and Nizhni-Novgorod; and on 8 November 1 774 came the news that Pugachev was finally defeated.48 Needless to say, the paper had no direct contact with the rebels and printed no news about them that had not been filtered through Russian government and military sources; its ability to depict this greatest of eighteenth-century peasant rebellions was limited because of the re­ moteness of the events and the Russian government's restrictive infor­ mation policy. That the Gazette de Leyde's minimal coverage of the Pugachev rebellion was not a result of any general policy of suppressing news about such events is clear from its treatment of other episodes of the time. The paper provided much more extensive coverage of another major peas­ ant uprising, the Horea revolt in Transylvania at the end of 1 785, coverage that was possible because there was a newspaper published even in that remote part of the world and because considerable informa­ tion filtered back via the Austrian government.49 This coverage could hardly be called objective: one story from Hermanstadt remarked, "If 48. This final report was datelined Moscow, 2 2 Sept. 1 774, just one week after Puga­ chev's capture and the end of the rebellion, so that the paper's infonnation was as up to date as the slowness of communications with Moscow pennitted. The fluctuations in the paper's evaluations of the rebellion's seriousness reflected the Russian government's own confusion. See Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherifll! the Great (New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press , ( 98 1 ), 249-55. 49. On the events of the Horea uprising, see Katherine Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 983), 94- 1 04. For a recent comparative study of the coverage of the rebellion in the European press of the day, see Nicolai Edroiu, Harm's Uprising: European Echoes (Bucharest: Academiei Republicii Socialiste Romania, 1 984).

Making News in the Eighteenth Century

[8 5 ]

one considers that the Wallachian Nation . . . consists of about 600,000 souls, and that they are almost entirely stupid and ignorant people, who have little or nothing to lose, one can easily understand how easily the spirit of sedition and pillage can spread, and, once it has been set in motion, how it can lead to the worst excesses."50 But its series of reports from Hermanstadt and Vienna gave a detailed account of the campaign against the rebels and pulled no punches in depicting the Austrian army's difficulties in putting them down. Of all the incidents of urban violence the paper described in the years before the French Revolution, the two that received the most extensive coverage were the Gordon Riots in London in 1 780 and the Lyon silkworkers' insurrection of 1 786. Both events took place in countries of interest to the paper, and it had little trouble obtaining information. In the case of the London outbreak, information was freely available from the London papers themselves. As in the case of the Horea rebels, the paper's coverage showed no sympathy with the rioters. According to one article, "The revolt . . . caused disorders and destruction which it would be difficult to match in the annals of civilized nations: But, having only the most vile class of the people for partisans, [who were] acting . . . on a pretext whose frivolity was acknowledged by the better part of the citizens," and lacking a real leader, "this revolt was no more than a straw fire, blazing up with the most extreme violence in order to extinguish itself quickly."5 1 This dismissive attitude toward the significance of the largest outbreak of urban violence in eighteenth-century England did not lead the paper to ignore the details of the event: the same issue recapitulated the entire story at much greater length than had been possible in previous issues. But Luzac and his correspondents saw the riot, for all its violence, as a meaningless incident in the larger context of English politics. 5 2 Although the paper's treatment of the Horea rebellion and the Gor­ don Riots were typical of the way it normally stereotyped stories involv­ ing popular violence, its coverage of the Lyon silkworkers' revolt in 1 786 had quite a different tone.58 The significance of the paper's extensive reporting on this episode was considerable, because there was no cover50. GL, 1 8 Jan. 1 785 (Hermanstadt, 25 Dec. 1 784). 5 1 . Ibid., 20 June 1 780 (London, 9 and 13 June). 5 2 . This attitude toward popular insurrections was a common one in eighteenth-century thought: it resembles Voltaire's comment, in his Philosophical Dictionary, that the people might indeed revolt from time to time, but that "these wars all end sooner or later with the subjection of the people, because the rich have the money." Article "Egalite," in Diction­ nairt philosophique (Paris: Garnier, 1 964), 1 72. The passage is a paraphrase of a text ofJohn Locke, cited in C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 962), 223, and reflects a deeply rooted Enlightenment attitude. 53. On the Lyon uprising, see the detailed account in Louis Trenard, "La crise sociale lyonnaise 11 la veille de la Revolution," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaim 2 ( 1 955), 545·

[86]

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

age in the French domestic press: the Journal de Lyon, published on the spot, was so tightly censored that not a word about the riots appeared. There was some coverage in the other international gazettes, but the Leiden paper's five long bulletins were the most extensive and complete. The anonymous authors of all these reports were, of course, on the side of the forces of law and order, and they all viewed the "people" who had participated in the riot from the other side of a deep social divide. Of the nine individuals identified by name in the five stories, only one was a worker, and he achieved this distinction because he was one of the three ringleaders executed afterward. But the newsletters stressed the rational economic motives behind the workers' collective behavior. The first newsletter Luzac printed explained that the trouble in Lyon had begun when the entrepreneurs of the Travaux Perrache had given their day­ laborers a raise. It was this raise that led the silkworkers and hatmakers to demand pay increases for themselves-hardly an irrational action.54 A subsequent newsletter took pains to show that the riot was not a spur­ of-the-moment affair, but came after the workers had made unsuccess­ ful attempts to gain their ends by peaceful means. 55 Admittedly the tone of this particular bulletin contrasted sharply with the "official" account furnished in the Paris newsletter carried in the same issue, which alleged that this riot, like others in Lyon earlier in the century, had "no basis, no cause, and no object." But even this harsh report made no secret of the economic causes underlying the revolt: in fact, its analysis in this regard was more thoroughgoing than that of any of the other reports the paper printed. "Some think the only cause was the natural restlessness of uneducated men, who believe themselves indispensable and indepen­ dent," this story noted, but it went on to say that others "attribute [it] to the precarious way of life of the majority of the silkworkers." The periodic ups and downs of the silk industry "inevitably throw many of the inhabitants into unemployment and distress, and want naturally makes them restless and violent."56 The Gazette de Leyde's series of reports on the Lyon uprising was not typical of its coverage of popular violence. These detailed accounts went beyond merely chronicling publicly observable events: the paper at­ tempted to account for the cause of the unrest. But this series of articles demonstrates the paper's ability to offer a relatively objective and even sympathetic account of a popular uprising, even though it had to rely on sources who were certainly not close to the workers.57 Compared with 54. GL, 2 5 Aug. 1 786 (Lyon, 15 Aug.). 55. Ibid., 1 Sept. 1 786 (Lyon, 15 Aug.). 5 6. Ibid. (Paris, 25 Aug.).

57. Comparison of the paper's dispatches with the correspondence from royal officials in the French archives suggests that the paper's stories were derived from the same sources as the official reports, that is, from responsible officials on the scene. Official reports in AN, F 1 2 , 1 44 1 .

Making News in the Eighteenth Century the remarks about the poor in the writings of the philosophes or even with the coverage the paper gave to many other popular uprisings of the period, its coverage of the Lyon affair attributed to the workers an unusual degree of political sophistication. Here was an instance when the GazeUe de Leyde's devotion to collecting as much accurate and detailed information as possible allowed the paper to break through the stereo­ typical categories of eighteenth-century social thought.

Selecting the News The pages of the GazeUe de Leyde could not contain all the news Jean Luzac was able to collect. The proceedings of the British Parliament alone would have filled the columns of a newspaper the size of the GazeUe de Leyde; indeed, they did largely fill the pages of its London­ based rival, the Courrier de l'Europe, for much of the 1 780s. Luzac's editorial selections incorporated certain value judgments. Luzac's selection criteria gave certain countries priority. A statistical breakdown of news reports by place of origin at five-year intervals during Luzac's editorship shows that only two European states held a more or less fixed place in Luzac's priorities: Britain and France. (See Table 1 .) London and Paris datelines appeared in almost every issue of the paper in 1 77 2 , 1 777, 1 782 , and 1 787; only in 1 792 did the greatly increased volume of French news lead to a virtual disappearance of English reports, which regained a modest place by 1 797. The balance between these two powers depended a great deal on the specific events of each year, but the total devoted to the two countries combined amounted to more than half of the paper's total news space in five of six years sampled. Only in 1 77 2 , a year in which there was an exceptional amount of coverage of northern Europe and a sharp reduction in cover­ age of France, did the total of British and French news make up less than 50 percent of the Gazette de Leyde's "news hole," the amount of space it could afford to devote to reporting. In 1 777, the news coverage for Britain and France took up about 65 percent; in 1 78 2 , nearly 60 per­ cent; in 1 787, nearly 57 percent; in 1 792, nearly 52 percent; and in 1 797, about 56 percent. The Gazette de Leyde's coverage of Britain and France differed from its coverage of all other countries not only because it was more extensive, but because reports from London and Paris normally included items on several different subjects. each one of which might be a continuing story extending over several issues. The GazeUe de Leyde's coverage of other countries was irregular, depending on the nature of the events. This coverage also differed from the coverage given to England and France because it tended to be single-issue coverage, inspired by one particular

[88] Table

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution I.

Sources of news in the Gazette de Leyde I

Region

1 77 2

1 777

1 782

1 787

1 792

1 797

France Britain and Ireland Austria Belgi um German states Iberia Italy Netherlands Poland Russia Scandinavia Switzerland Turkey United States Non-European

1 1 .0 % 20.6 2·5 0.2 1 0.6

1 9.6% 45.6 0·4 2 ·4 3. 1 5·7 1 .5 1 .5 5·3 6.2 2·4 0·4 3·7 1 .3 0·7

1 9·3% 40.5 3.0

42.3% 1 4 ·5 2 ·3 1 2 ·7 2 ·7 2.0 0.8 7.8 4·3 3·5 0.8

49·9 % 2 .0 1 .4 20·5 7.6 0· 7 0.8 1 .8 9·3 0.6 5·5

45·9 % 10.2 6. 1 1.1 1 1 .6 1 .8 1 7 ·5 2·3

3. 1 2 ·9 1 7 ·7 1 .9 1 9·5 8·3 1 .7

1 .2 1 2 ·3 0·5 1 2 ·3 0.2 0·7 0·9 4·4 1 .4 1 .4 2.6

2.2 2·7 1 .2

0·5 0·4 1 .8 0·5 0·4

Totals do not equal 100% because of rounding. 1 . Tables are based on a sample consisting of every fifth issue for the years 1 772. 1 777. 1 782. 1 787. 1 792. and 1 797. beginning with issue number 1 for each year. This sampling procedure assures that Tuesday and Friday issues of the paper are equally represented. eliminating any bias that might have been caused by the mail-coach schedules to different points. All material appearing under datelines from a given country or region has been classified as news from that region. although reports from major news centers such as London. Paris. or Hamburg often included news from other regions (for example. reports about the war in North America often appeared under London datelines) ; to distinguish the different news items within lengthy newsletters would have required an inordinate amount of work. Material appearing as advertisements or documentary material selected by the editor and published under a Leiden dateline has not been included in the statistical analysis.

story and ceasing when that story had reached some sort of resolution. Thus a sharp upsurge of reports from Denmark, Sweden, and Poland in 1 77 2 faded after Struensee had been executed in Copenhagen, Gusta­ vus III had dipped the wings of the Swedish Estates, and the partition­ ing powers had imposed their will on Warsaw. Even within these zones of shifting interest, however, the Gazette de Leyde differentiated between countries in terms of the amount of cover­ age when especially newsworthy developments did take place. The pa­ per would endeavor to obtain information from the capitals of all the major combatants during wars: thus Madrid, normally a marginal source of news, became a major source of information when Spain entered the Anglo-French conflict in 1 779, and Austrian datelines be­ came more prominent during the "phony war" with Prussia in 1 77 8 and the campaign against Turkey in 1 788.

Making News in the Eighteenth Century

[89]

When it came to domestic crises, however, the paper was much more selective. It made provisions for extensive special coverage only in coun­ tries where it either had significant circulation or where there were certain kinds of political institutions. It was much more attentive to the Baltic states than to the Mediterranean, for example. Poland was the most striking example, but the paper also covered major events in Sweden and Denmark with admirable thoroughness. These countries had only a rudimentary domestic press of their own, in which extrater­ ritorial papers, both French- and German-language, played an impor­ tant political role, and Luzac was aware that they constituted one of his major markets. The Gazette de Leyde did also print substantial coverage of events in some European countries where its circulation was miniscule. During the simmering crisis in Ireland between 1 778 and 1 784, Dublin datelines became relatively common in the paper, and in 1 782 it devoted consid­ erable space to the revolutionary unrest in Geneva. Together with its ample coverage of the Polish Diet and the Swedish Estates, the paper's attention to these two regions demonstrated its sensitivity to political affairs in those countries with what the eighteenth century understood as constitutional forms of government. Sweden attracted the paper's attention when its king drastically trimmed the power of the country's quasi-parliamentary Estates, and in Poland its coverage dealt with the Diet's struggles to reform itself and protect the country from its rapa­ cious absolutist neighbors. In all these cases, as well as in his treatment of the American War of Independence and the French troubles up to and during the Revolution, Luzac regarded events as newsworthy because he saw the issue of liberty as being at stake. Like the twentieth-century historians R. R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot, Luzac viewed the series of disturbances which we now label the "democratic" or "Atlantic" revo­ lution as vital events. 5 8 The selectivity of the Gazette de Leyde's news coverage is also evident in the list of countries it normally disregarded; namely, the three great eastern monarchies. Datelines from Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg were not exactly rarities in the paper, but the coverage from those capitals almost invariably consisted of short reports, limited to military and diplomatic subjects. Luzac even responded to one of the many Prussian complaints about his paper by pointing out to the Dutch au­ thorities that he gave Prussia less coverage than any other major power. 59 The relative paucity of coverage about the eastern monarchies 58. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Dtmocratic Revolution (Princeton, N.J . : Princeton U niver­ sity Press, 1 959-64); Jacques Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1 770- 1 799, trans. Herben H. Rowen (New York: Free Press , 1 965). 59. Letter (written by Jean Luzac but signed by the elder Etienne Luzac) to Grand Pensionary Van Boyen, I I July 1 776, in LGA-VH, Z( I ). no. 38.

[90]

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

was not simply a function of difficulty in obtaining information or a lack of significant news events to cover. If Catherine II did effectively limit the amount of domestic news available about Russia, Berlin and par­ ticularly the Vienna of Joseph I I were much freer. Joseph II's sweeping program of reforms was at least as significant as, say, the Irish Volunteer movement. Nor was this lack of interest in the absolutist capitals a reflection of the Gazette de Leyde's inability to penetrate those markets. The paper was known in all three empires, and circulated extensively in Vienna, where it was regularly reprinted from 1 786 to 1 7 9 2 . Luzac may have limited coverage of the three great absolutist powers partly because they lacked the quasi-parliamentary institutions that per­ mitted the kind of constitutionalist politics to which he was most de­ voted. Probably at least as important in influencing his choice of news items, however, was the fact that all three of these powers regularly sought to limit the circulation of uncensored news in their domains by methods which included using their ambassadors in The Hague to harass Dutch newspaper editors. The Gazette de Leyde's archives for 1 77 2 to 1 798 preserve more complaints from the Prussian ambassador Fried­ rich Wilhelm von Thulemeyer alone than from the rest of the diplo­ matic corps combined, and Austria's Joseph II was the only ruler to adopt the brilliant but vicious stratagem of punishing the paper by authorizing a complete reprint edition of it in his capital. Clearly it made sense to minimize conflicts with such touchy states by leaving potentially controversial news from their territories out of the paper.60 Hence the doings of Frederic I I , Catherine II , and Joseph I I , well publicized in their own propaganda, in the writings of the French philosophes, and in other media, were relegated to marginal status in the Gazette de Leyde. Coverage of the Mediterranean world was also minimal. Although Dutch trade with Spain, Portugal, the Iberian states, and the Levant was significant and the paper could thus count on a regular network of communications, it gave little space to these areas. Italy had a significant news press of its own, which would have limited potential sales, while in Spain, where the domestic press was weak, censorship restrictions were harsher than anywhere else in western Europe. There was a fairly consistent trickle of reports datelined the Barbary Coast before the French Revolution, reflecting the persistent harassment of European shipping which was a permanent fact of life for traders in the region. 60. News coverage of the Austrian Netherlands constituted an exception to the paper's general treatment of Habsburg territories: during the unrest there in 1 786-90, Belgian affairs became one of the paper's main preoccupations. But the paper's editorial bias was so strongly in favor of the Austrian authorities and against the rebellious corporate bodies in the Belgian provinces that Vienna had no reason to complain, and the London Times charged that Luzac's paper had been "bought up by the Emperor's Government, and is wholly at his will" ( 1 7 Mar. 1 789).

Making News in the Eighteenth Century The paper also provided regular correspondence from Turkey, and these stories tended to be considerably longer than those from the North African capitals. The motivation for the Turkish coverage was, of course, the fact that Constantinople was repeatedly involved in wars with various European powers. Another customary blind spot in the Gazette de Leyde's news coverage was its own immediate surroundings, the United Provinces. Regular news in the form of bulletins providing a more or less continuous narrative was almost totally lacking in the paper, even at the height of the Patriot troubles in which Jean Luzac was so intimately involved. Dutch datelines reached a peak of over 1 2 percent in 1 78 2 , when the stories primarily concerned the slow progress toward Dutch diplomatic recognition of the United States, and actually fell off to less than 8 percent in 1 787, the year of the greatest activity and final collapse of the Patriot movement. 6 1 The amount of space given to Dutch affairs in 1 787 was much less than that devoted to the disorders in the neighboring Austrian Netherlands. One reason was that during periods of excite­ ment, such as the Patriottentijd from 1 780 to 1 787 and the first years of the Batavian Republic after 1 795, Dutch readers had access to an exten­ sive revolutionary press in their own language in which local events were recounted at length and freely commented upon, so they had no need of a French chronicle of their affairs. Moreover, foreign readers could not be expected to take much interest in internal Dutch politics. But Luzac also avoided domestic news because he had good reason to fear that the paper's long-term future would be jeopardized if it became an overtly partisan organ in Dutch politics. He must have been well aware that the Gazette d'Utrecht's privilege was handed from editor to editor as the factional balance in the city council there shifted during the Patriot troubles, and the Gautte d'Amsterdam's publisher kept his hired editor on a short leash to avoid similar problems.62 Discretion about Dutch affairs was the wisest policy. Although specific political reasons determined the allocation of news space in the Gazette de Leyde, the result was a pattern similar to that found in other m�or newspapers of the period. (See Table 2.) The dominance of foreign over domestic news was characteristic of the eighteenth­ century press in general. Jiirgen Wilke, in his study of the Hamburg 6 1 . These figures admittedly do not take into account a considerable number of docu­ ments from various city councils, provincial estates, and extraconstitutional gatherings published in the paper's documentary section during these years. The figures for 1 787 are also distorted by the fact that the Prussian intervention in September of that year put an abrupt end to reporting on Dutch domestic affairs. 62. Kluit, "Hollandsche en Fransche Utrechtse Couranten," 1 1 3- 1 4 ; letters of Gauttt d'Amsttrdam editor Franc;ois Bernard to Dumont-Pigalle, 8 Oct. 1 786, 25 Oct. 1 786, in AR, DP, carton A.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution Table

2. Rank order of news sources accounting for more than 1 0 percent of the

Gazette de Leyde's news content in a given year Year

1 777

1 792 1 797

Ranked sources Britain and Ireland Scandinavia Poland France German States Britain and Ireland France Britain and Ireland France Netherlands Iberia France Britain and Ireland Belgium France Belgium France Italy German states Britain and Ireland

papers, found that in the two eighteenth-century years he studied, 1 736 and 1 796, more than half the news items in the Hamburg Correspondent concerned foreign events with no discernible relation to the German world. The Hamburg Correspondent, like the Gazette de Leyde, gave special prominence to England and France.63 A comparison of news coverage in English, French, German, and American papers of the period shows that a bias in favor of foreign news was characteristic of the press in all these areas down to the end of the eighteenth century.54 The British press began to highlight domestic politics once it was given freedom to transcribe parliamentary debates after 1 77 1 , but the geographical dis­ tribution of news coverage in the Gazette de Leyde was characteristic of other major continental newspapers in its day. 63. Wilke, Nachrichlmawwahl, 1 49-55· 64. Jurgen Wilke, "Auslandsberichtentattung und internationaler Nachrichtenfluss im Wandel," Publizistilc 3 1 ( 1 g86), 68, 77. The space given to news from various regions of Europe in 1 796, the only year covered in Wilke's study that falls in the period of this analysis of the Gautte de lIyde, shows clear similarities to the distribution of news space in the Leiden paper for 1 797: France and the two regions of major military activity, Germany and Italy, received the most coverage in the papen from England, Germany, and France that Wilke studied.

Making News in the Eighteenth Century

The Language of Eighteenth-Century Journalistic Narrative After collecting information and selecting items according to the source and the subject category, Jean Luzac worked to phrase the mate­ rial in authoritative language. Journalism being a form of history, Luzac, like all historians, could not ask his readers to make a "willing suspension of disbelief." Journalists, like historians, "address themselves to distrustful readers who expect from them not only that they narrate but that they authenticate their narrative."65 Luzac's method of accom­ plishing this was not the only one available to journalists in the late eighteenth century; indeed, it differed from the style the Gazette de Leyde itself had employed in earlier periods. But the impersonal, objective style he adopted served as a "strategic ritual" that made the paper's distinctive representation of European political reality believable to se­ rious, well-informed readers.66 In the ninety-five years before Jean Luzac became its editor, the Gazette de Leyde had employed a variety of journalistic styles. In the late seventeenth century, its newsletters were a jumble of one- and two­ sentence items, strung together with no apparent connections. A typical passage from a French report of 1 688 reads, "The day before, fourteen prisoners escaped from the Abbey prison, after having soundly beaten the jailer and the guards. Yesterday a courrier arrived bringing the news that the Grand Deacon of Liege had been elected Bishop. We are assured that 5000 cavalry and 1 0,000 infantry are going to be raised. The King went hunting yesterday near Meudon."67 This stream-of­ consciousness style, in which no context was provided for individual items and no attempt made to give them credibility, resembles the hurried news summaries common on American commercial radio sta­ tions today; it may well have been intended for reading aloud, and presumably seventeenth-century readers were adept at inserting pauses between unrelated items as they read along. The apparent disorder of the reporting did not exclude the introduction of a definite news bias in some items. The Paris reports of 1 687 show a clear sympathy with the Jansenists as opposed to the Jesuits and with the Huguenots exposed to Louis XIV's persecutions.68 The paper was also very free in its remarks about prominent individuals, in the style of the late eighteenth-century 65' Paul Ricoeur, TifM and Narrative, 2 vols. , K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 984), 1 : 1 76. 66. On the notion of journalistic objectivity as a "strategic ritual," see Gaye Tuchman, "Objectivity as a Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen's Notions of Objectivity," Americanjoumal ofSociDlot:J 77 ( 1 972), 660-79 · 67. GL, 26 Aug. 1 688 (Paris, 20 Aug.). 68. Ibid., 4 Feb. 1 687 (Paris, 28 Jan.).

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution English press. A typical item from 1 687 reads, "A nun from a distin­ guished family has also been removed from a convent in Puy, by virtue of a lettre de cachet, because, it is said, the Bishop of Puy was paying too much attention to her."69 The journalistic language that Etienne Luzac employed when he first took control of the paper in the late 1 730S was the opposite of the unstructured tone of the original Gazette de Leyde. The paper's political reports now eschewed the earlier uninhibited, gossipy quality. For ex­ ample, the report from Paris in the issue of 2 January 1 739 devoted two­ and-a-half columns to the Imperial ambassador's state visit to the Picpus convent, including a detailed "description of the Ambassador's car­ riages." The Gazette de Leyde of the 1 680s and 1 690S and after 1 750 would never have given so much space to a purely ceremonial event. On the other hand, the paper's material became more structured. Longer items were broken into paragraphs, which generally corresponded to distinct topics, so that the text lost the rambling quality characteristic of the age of Louis XIV. The paper's reports became much more re­ strained and formal in character; the gap between the language of the official press and that of the Gazette de Leyde had been greatly reduced. Over the next four decades, the paper evolved away from the official press by expanding the scope of its press coverage, but it did so without returning to the sensational scandal-mongering tone of its early days or of the contemporary English press. The result was a serious, high­ journalistic voice that resembled the style of the court gazettes, but the extent of the paper's coverage clearly distinguished it from these rivals. In his private correspondence, Jean Luzac could sling mud with the best of his contemporaries, but he drew a strict line between language suit­ able for publication and that which was not. A story on the choice of deputies for the French Estates-General in 1 789 exemplifies the differ­ ence in tone between his paper and its more outspoken competitors. In April 1 7 89, both the Gazette de Leyde and the Courier du Bas-Rhin printed a bulletin that concluded, "In the number of the representatives, there are, no doubt, some men of great merit; but one cannot hide the fact that, in many places, they were not the ones who were preferred to their rivals." The Courier du Bas-Rhin went on to add a phrase that would never have sullied the columns of the Leiden paper, however: "No doubt the people have their reasons for choosing them, and perhaps they thought that the Estates-General would be a bath that would rein­ vigorate all the impotent ones and cleanse all the lepers."7 o Both the papers thus commented critically on the deputies and on the electorate that had chosen them, but the Gazette de Leyde's criticism was restrained 69. Ibid., 1 9 Aug. 1 687 (Paris, 1 2 Aug.). 70. Ibid . , 2 4 Apr. 1 789; Courier du Bas-Rhin, 25 Apr. 1 789.

Making News in the Eighteenth Century

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and impersonal; the Courier du Bas-Rhin, by contrast, chose to be vivid, concrete, and, no doubt, more entertaining, but at the price of making even the dullest reader alert to the fact that this news source had a distinct bias. Serious, dignified, and somewhat dull language contributed to the Gazette de Leyde's image as a dependable news source, but so did the manner in which it unfolded its stories. Luzac always reminded readers of how uncertain the details of his news were. He was acutely aware that "the first reports of a striking event are always full of errors, and that the clouds that hide the truth are greater, the farther away one is from it."7 1 Despite his best efforts, there were bound to be mistaken reports in his paper, and the only way he could maintain a reputation for truthfulness was to structure narratives in such a way that readers were drawn into what another journalist of the time called "this not un philosophical occupation in which one follows the growth or diminution of the truth, and sees it emerge bit by bit from the coverings with which error has distorted it, or, after having dazzled for a moment with misleading rays, dissolve like a mirage and rejoin the pack of lies from which it came. "72 An essential feature of the Gazette de Leyde's journalistic strategy was the frequent publication of significant official documents: royal edicts, texts of parliamentary speeches and contestatory groups' manifestoes, international treaties, and the like. Like modem "newspapers of rec­ ord," the paper lent veracity to its own news accounts by inviting readers to examine for themselves the evidence it cited. Even if they did not labor through the columns of tiny type in which the documents were printed, readers would be persuaded by their presence. Luzac added to the impact of these published documents by the caution with which he presented them: in a world in which rulers were under no obligation to inform their subjects of their actions, readers had good reason to won­ der how authentic the materials a newspaper published were. The Ga­ zette de Leyde sought to reassure them by indicating the source of its texts or by stating that they came from reliable informants. But the Gazette de Leyde was much more than simply a collection of unrelated documents. Its main feature was its news reports, and Luzac established their veracity by repeatedly but unobtrusively demonstrat­ ing to readers the caution with which he proceeded before publishing any item. In his paper, news stories rarely recounted events in the form of a closed narrative of a completed action. Even an event as sharply limited in time and space as the storming of the Bastille on 1 4 July 1 789 came to be reported in the Gazette de Leyde as a suspense story spread 7 1 . Jean Luzac to the Grand Master of the Order of Malta, 1 2 Dec. 1 775, in LGA-VH, Z( I ), no. 37.

72. [Pidansat de Mairobert, attrib.], MimoiTes secrets, 25:8-9.

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over several issues. The issue of 2 1 July 1 789, which printed a newsletter from Paris written on 1 3 July, concluded with an editor's note dated 20 July, bringing readers the first intimation that something extraordinary had happened in the French capital. But because the paper wanted to be as truthful as possible, Luzac explained that he was not publishing the latest, unverified reports from Paris : "There are some that speak of blood spilled by troops in the middle of the capital, and of all the horrors that announce a civil war." This alarming anticipation must have sent readers scurrying for their papers three days later, where they found a letter from Paris, dated 1 7 July, which brought them up to date on what Luzac, in an editorial note dated 22 July, called a series of events "more striking, more sudden, more astounding in all their details" than any others in modern history. But this rapid summary of the storming of the Bastille was not the end of the matter. The supplement to the same issue, printed a day later, went over the same ground, but in much greater detail, and subsequent issues continued to fill in the background of the event, whose significance thus only became clear over a period of several weeks. This cautious, cumulative depiction of the storming of the Bastille was not merely a result of the Leiden paper's distance from Paris: it was a journalistic strategy quite different from that of the excited pamphlet-journalists in Paris, who, despite protestations that "it is impossible to provide immediately a detailed and exact report," in fact claimed to have produced an instant chronicle that could serve as "an immortal monument" to an event whose significance they were ready to define on the spot.73 Unlike the French journalists, who immediately made the 1 4 July event a mythic occurrence,74 Luzac'sjournalistic strat­ egy was deliberately designed to demystify it, to keep readers from jumping to conclusions about it, and to embed even such an unusual occurrence in the continuously flowing stream of events. This cautious, piecemeal method of reporting, applied even to such sharply defined events as the storming of the Bastille, was even more evident in the Gazette de Leyde's coverage of more routine news. Typ­ ically, whether the paper's focus was on a war, a diplomatic negotiation, 73. Citations from Paris sauve, au Ricit dttaiUt des evenemms qui onl eu lieu Ii Paris, def1uis le dimanche 12 Juilkt 1 789, une heure apres-midi jusqu'au vnulredi suivant au soir (Paris: n.p., 1 789), 3 ; and Uacques Beffroy de Reigny), Precis exact de la prise de la Bastilk, redige sow les ']tuX des fnimipaux acteurs qui onljoue un role dans celie expedition, {5 lu le mimejour a I'Hotel-de­ Ville (Paris: Baudouin, 1 789), 1 . On the earliest printed narratives of the storming of the Bastille, see Hans-Jiirgen Liisebrink and Rolf Reichardt, "La prise de la Bastille comme 'evenement total.' Jalons pour une throrie historique de l'evenement a l'epoque mod­ erne," in Centre Meridional d'Histoire Sociale, L'Evinement (colloque d' Aix-en-Provence, 1 983) (Marseille: Laffitte, 1 986), 77- 102. 74. See Claude Labrosse and Pierre Retat, " La legende immediate de la Revolution dans la presse de 1 789," in La ligende de la Revolution (Clermont-Ferrand: Faculte des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de I'Universite Blaise-Pascal, 1 988), 1 27-36.

Making News in the Eighteenth Century or a domestic constitutional crisis, news coverage was spread out over many weeks, if not months or even years. The events that the Gazette de Leyde considered worth reporting in any detail usually cast a long shad­ ow ahead of them. In covering the outbreak of a typical eighteenth­ century war, the paper was likely to pick up warning tremors months or even years before anything specific occurred. An article on 9 January 1 784 complained that war between Russia and Turkey had been immi­ nent for a whole year and yet nothing definite had happened; as it turned out, this brewing conflict did not explode until 1 787. This war was an extreme case, made more difficult for the paper because of poor access to information in Constantinople and St. Petersburg, but even in capitals where correspondents were well informed, decisions to make war were usually bruited about long before real consequences ensued. Thus Luzac had reported as early as 1 8 April 1 777 that there was discussion in Paris about a war with England in support of the Ameri­ cans, but at that date, the paper considered the prospect unlikely. By 2 7 June 1 777, the gazette had reports o f American privateers operating out of French ports; on 1 August 1 777 it told readers that a French declara­ tion of war was imminent. In fact the treaty between France and the United States committing the Bourbon monarchy to the war was not signed until December 1 777, and France did not officially break off relations with the British until March 1 778; fighting only began with the British naval attack on the Belle Poule in June. The way the French involvement in the war progressed from a speculative possibility to a probability and then, slowly, took on the lineaments of reality was typical of the way many of the Gazette de Leyde's news stories developed. It reflected a sense that important events did not happen suddenly but evolved over time. The paper depicted the actions of states, and of major groups within them, as calculable and hence predictable: indeed, events followed stereotypical patterns, so that although the journalist'S func­ tion was to tell what was new, in fact, "contrary to what the journalist would like to make us believe," there is no "real innovation in history . . . but merely the coming about of already known possibilities."75 Because the limits of historical possibility were assumed to be known in advance, the Gazette de Leyde had merely to sketch in the exact details of the processes it recorded. The drama and tension in its reports came from the episodic manner in which it necessarily had to chronicle the world around it. Thanks to the regular interruption of the story imposed by periodic publication, readers were kept in suspense, waiting for the always-promised "continuation in the next number": as Pierre Retat comments, "the report comes as a reappearance that fulfills an expecta75. Pierre Retat, "Les gazettes: De I'evenement a I'histoire," in Henri Duranton et aI., EtuJes SUT III presse 3 ( 1 978), 27·

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tion."76 Through this narrative style, journalist and reader became part­ ners in the difficult discovery of the truth about contemporary history. And by his constant reiteration of the tentativeness of all his reports and the unofficial nature of the documentary texts in his paper, Luzac safeguarded himself against interference from governments, as he could always excuse what he had printed on the grounds that he had made an honest error. Luzac did not preach or thunder at his readers to convince them of the truth of his accounts, nor did he resort to sensa­ tionalism. Instead, by constantly striking the pose of a mere mortal, limited in his ability to discover the truth, he won readers' trust for the version of historical reality that he had painstakingly assembled. From the diversity of materials that he assembled twice each week at his desk in Leiden Jean Luzac created a journalistic text whose words were often taken verbatim from the letters and documents his corre­ spondents provided, but whose spirit arose from the frame within which they were set: the continuously appearing Gazette de Leyde. Luzac accom­ plished his task of "making news" in such a way that the significance of a report or a document in his paper was different from the significance of the same item as it appeared in any other source of the period. Before his readers could receive the fruits of his labors, however, Luzac had to see the Gazette de Leyde through the press, and eighteenth-century tech­ nology severely restricted the amount of information he could furnish readers. 76. Ibid., 3 1 .

Producing a Newspaper in the Eighteenth Century

O nce he had selected the news and documents destined for each issue of the paper, Jean Luzac's personal role in the production of the Gazette de Leyde was at an end. Unlike Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in the 1 73os, most of the European newspaper editors of the eighteenth century were incapable of setting type or operating a printing press. Nor did they usually have much to do with the distribution of the printed copies or the management of their enterprise's business affairs. Yet all these aspects of newspaper production vitally affected the content of newspapers and their impact. Jean Luzac may have left the hard work of printing and distributing the Gaz.ette de Leyde to others, but he was acutely aware of the many ways in which printing technology and the necessities of marketing impinged on his freedom to disseminate the news. Printing the Gazette de Leyde Of all the constraints that helped shape the Gazette de Leyde, none would have seemed more immutable to Jean Luzac than the technology of the wooden hand press on which his newspaper, like every other printed work before 1 800, was produced. Ironically, no other aspect of journalism would be so rapidly transformed in the nineteenth century. Dependence on the wooden, hand-powered printing press had pro­ found consequences for the nature of every journalistic text of Luzac's day. Technology restricted the amount of information Jean Luzac could fit into the two weekly editions of his paper. It limited the number of copies he could sell and therefore the size of the audience and the

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revenue he could obtain, and those limits in turn set bounds to the amount and quality of information he could publish and the impact his paper could have. A close analysis of the methods used to transmute the news reports Luzac obtained into black marks on white paper is no mere antiquarian exercise: it is central to an understanding of the nature of the Gazette de Leyde's historical role. In recent years, historians have taken a keen interest in the details of printing processes before 1 800 , a subject formerly reserved for special­ ists in material bibliography and the narrow field of printing history. In the English-speaking world, Robert Darnton has done more than any­ one else to describe the ways in which words were turned into print in the age of the Enlightenment. Using the very rich records of the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel (STN), he and the Swiss scholar Jacques Rychner have been able to reconstruct the process by which books such as the STN edition of Diderot's Encyclopedie were published. Darnton has even accomplished the tour de force of identifying the pressman whose thumbprint appears in the margin of a surviving copy of that work. But the text of the third edition of the Encyclopedie, the subject of Darnton's Business of Enlightenment, was little affected by the mechanical process that made its reproduction possible . l Authors of books in the eighteenth century could afford to remain relatively ignorant of the mechanics of printi�g. Prevailing technology set some limits on the nature of the texts they could create if they wished to see them in print: they could not demand the complete integration of text and illustrations that modern methods allow, or insist on exotic typefaces. But those constraints probably did not bother most authors: these were constants that had prevailed since Gutenberg's day. On the other hand, journalists were continually reminded of the constraints technology imposed. To function at all within the restric­ tions imposed by their printing equipment, they had to organize the work of producing their gazettes according to principles entirely dif­ ferent from those followed in book publication, and they had to push the balky wooden press to the limits of its possibilities. It is not surprising that the greatest European newspaper of the first half of the nineteenth century, the London Times, was also the first printing enterprise to adopt the steam-powered rotary press, which allowed a quantum jump in its press run, a massive increase in its total audience, and consequently an unmistakable growth in the newspaper's political and cultural influ­ ence.2 In view of the special importance of printing technology to the production of newspapers, it is surprising that so little recent scholarI . Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer­ sity Press , 1 979). 2 . [Morison et al.], History oftAe '7'inw, " I : 1 1 0- 1 5. The first Koenig press, installed for the Tinw in 1 8 1 4, could print four times as many sheets per hour as the handpress.

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ship on hand-printing methods pays attention to the peculiarities of newspaper printing. Although records of the Gazette de Leyde's printing operations do not seem to have survived, a Dutch scholar has recently published an early­ nineteenth-century Dutch manuscript on printing techniques written by a certain David Wardenaar-and Wardenaar had almost certainly prac­ ticed his trade in the Gazette de Leyde's printing shop.3 His manuscript is the only manual for the printing trade from the hand press era known to have been written by a man experienced in newspaper publication. As the references to newspaper printing scattered through Warde­ naar's work indicate, the basic difference between newspaper printing and other forms of printing work was that the printers of newspapers constantly faced the pressure of deadlines. Workers in a newspaper shop "must frequently work as if on a forced march," Waardenaar remarked, "often hastily, as fast as a bird's flight."4 Unlike most books, the newspaper had to be ready by a specified time or it lost all value. Consequently, newspaper printing required a work rhythm very dif­ ferent from that prevailing in most other printing shops in the eigh­ teenth century. Darnton and Rychner have shown how irregular the working patterns in the STN shop were: the amount of type set and the number of sheets printed varied widely from day to day, and even the same worker might work twice as fast one day as he did the next. Printers working on a book might have to do some of their tasks in haste, to finish the job, but they could look forward to some slack time afterward.5 This pattern was not accidental, but represented a functional adaptation to the unpredictable fluctuations of book and job printing. Paul Gaskell notes that "the printing trade has always had to accommodate great variation of demand, and its operations have had to be correspondingly flexible."6 But a newspaper shop did not operate under these condi­ tions. For newspaper publishers, there was a steady flow of work on a predictable schedule. Consequently, newspaper printing required a sense of time and a degree of organization quite foreign to the habits that prevailed in a book publishing firm such as the STN. The records of the Dutch-language Amsterdamsche Courant from the 3. Wardenaar, whose manuscript dates from l So I , had worked in a newspaper print­ ing shop in Leiden from 1 767 to 1 773. There were two newspapers in the city at that time, Luzac's enterprise and the Dutch-language Ltydse Courant. Given that Wardenaar moved on to work in the French-language printing shop of Reinier Arrenberg in Rotterdam after 1 773, it seems plausible that his earlier experience had been in the Gazette de Leyde shop. Frans A. janssen, ed., ZeUen en DruMrm in de achUiende Eeuw: David Wardenaar's Beschrijving der BoelulnJckunst (1801) (Haarlem: Enschede, 1 982), 53-55. 4. j anssen, ed., DruMrm 427, 429. 5. Darnton, Bwmtss, 2 1 9-227; jacques Rychner, "A I'ombre des Lumieres: Coup d'oeil sur Ia main-d'oeuvre de quelques imprimeries du XVIIle siecle," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 1 55 ( 1 976), 1 938. 6. Paul Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1 972), 1 60. ,

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution mid-eighteenth century clarify the difference between book printing and newspaper work. The eight printing-shop workers who put out the triweekly paper kept a rigid schedule. On the three printing days, they put in twenty hours on the job, from 8

A.M.

to 4 or

5 A.M.

the next day .

They could sleep late the following morning, but still had to work at least a four-hour shift cleaning and redistributing type to be ready for the next day's marathon. N ot only were the working hours more regular than in the STN shop, but the workers' productivity had to be relatively constant, too : each issue of the paper contained roughly the same amount of type and had to be printed in the same number of copies. The erratic performances typical of the STN labor force could never have been tolerated. In return for their greater discipline, of course, the workers were assured of a more regular income . They were not likely to be laid off during slack periods, and in fact the

Amsterdamsche Courant's

printers were generally long-termers : in 1 76 7 , they had been with the paper from four to forty years, and turnover in the printing shop was almost nonexistent. 7 This was evidently the case for the

Gazette de Leyde

as well . When he finally sold the paper to N apoleon's brother Louis in 1 807 , Etienne Luzac made a special point of asking for pensions for his printing-shop workers, "who have served me in this undertaking, some for thirty or forty years. " 8 To assure this loyalty , newspaper publishers paid their printers well, in contrast to publishers of books and other materials , and even gave them such benefits as retirement pay .9 The Luzacs' paper required the same dependable publishing operation that its Amsterdam neighbor did, and must have adopted similar procedures to obtain it. Twice a week, the printing-shop workers on whom the production of the

Gazette de Leyde depended began the well-worn routine that resulted

in an eight-page newspaper. Jean Luzac himself probably did not super­ vise the work they did, but he must have known from long experience j ust how much text the compositors could set in the time available for each issue, and his editorial decisions had to be made accordingly. 1 0 The 7. Eeghen, "Amsterdamsche Courant," 36. 8 . LGA-VH , Z(II) , no. 1 1 9 ( 1 807). 9. Janssen, ed. , Drukken , 443. In 1 767, the four compositors who worked for the Amsterdamsche Courant earned 8,5 gulden a week, and the two pressmen 6,5 gulden, higher wages than their contemporaries in Paris would have received, but less than half of the 117 shillings a week that London newspaper printing workers earned in 1 785. Eeghen, "Am­ sterdamsche Courant," 36; Anon. , Printing the 'Times ' since 1 785 (London: Printing House Square, 1 953), 1 5- 1 6. 10. The archives of the Gazette de Leyde do not indicate when the younger Etienne Luzac took over the direction of the paper's printing operations from his father. Article 1 1 of the contract between the senior Etienne Luzac and his two nephews, signed at the time of their father's death in 1 783, specified that one or the other would have the presses in his house, and receive a fixed sum of 500 gulden annually for the incidental expenses of the printing operation. To guarantee Etienne Luzac's devotion to this end of the newspaper's opera­ tion, the contract bound him to refrain from any other business activity. LGA-VH , Z(II), no. 5 1 .

Producing a Newspaper in the Eighteenth Century actual printing shop could not have been very large. Throughout the period with which we are concerned, the paper's presses were housed in the building where Etienne Luzac and his family lived. At some point after Jean Luzac had ceased to be the editor, Etienne invested in a new shop, located in a building of its own. When he sold the paper to the Dutch government in 1 807, Etienne Luzac put the value of this shop and its equipment at 5,000 gulden, the equivalent of 1 0,000 French livres. 1 1 This was a modest price: a French author of a handbook for printers, published in 1 79 1 , had estimated that the cost of type and two presses for a small printing shop, exclusive of the building it was housed in, would cost 8,255 livres, and a French newspaper publisher whose printing shop had been destroyed in 1797 estimated his losses at 40,000 livres.12 The shop that the Gazette de Leyde had used before Etienne Luzac decided to house it separately was probably smaller and less valuable than the premises it occupied in 1 807. Internal evidence from surviving copies of the paper helps us recon­ struct the tasks in the Gazette de Leyde 's printing shop. Each issue actually consisted of two separate four-page newspapers: the ordinaire, the first four pages of the issue, was set in type and handed over to the pressmen a day ahead of the four-page supplement, even though both bore the same date. l !J The printed area of the pages measured 1 9 cm by 1 3 cm, slightly larger than the format the paper had employed a hundred years earlier, but much smaller than the English or Dutch newspapers of the period. The pages of the ordinaire were divided into two columns; the supplement was set in long lines running across the page. Perhaps this procedure made it easier to sort the printed sheets and put together complete copies. Both sections of the paper were set in the same minis­ cule body type, a size that French printers called petit romain. One good compositor could set about two-thirds of a printing form-the wooden frame that contained the type used to print one sheet-in this size per day; each eight-page issue of the Gazette de Leyde required two such forms and thus represented at least three man-days of setting work. 14 In fact, it probably came to even more, because a good part of the paper was usually in even smaller petit texte type, which the Luzacs employed for the numerous documents they published. 1 1 . Etienne Luzac, letter of 3 1 May 1 807, ibid., no. 1 1 8. I ll . M. S. Boulard, U manuel tk l'imfnimeur (Paris: Boulard, 1 79 1 ) , 8 1 -84; Poncelin, bankruptcy dossier, 10 Feb. 1 804, in Archives departementales de la Seine (Paris), D 1 1 U(3) 114, d. 1 638. 1 3. The editor's note that normally appeared on page 4 of the ordinaire customarily bore a date one day earlier than the date of publication, whereas the editorial note at the top of page 5, the first page of the supplement, bore the date of publication, and last-minute material always appeared on page 8 of that section, indicating that it was the last to go to press. The Gazette tk Cologne, whose format was identical to the Gazette tk Leytk's, acknowl­ edged the one-day delay between its two four-page sections by giving them different dates. 1 4. Feyel, Gazette, 1 0 1 .

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution Theoretically, two skilled compositors could have set the type each

issue required in two days, but it is more likely that the paper employed at least four typesetters, like the Amsterdamsche Courant whose three four­ page issues (in a slightly larger format) contained somewhat less type . i 5 A composing-room staff working a t top speed could hardly have pro­ duced work of the quality found in the paper, or coped with the acci­ dents bound to accompany newspaper production. As it is, the composi­ tors of the Gazette de Leyde were certainly among the most careful and accurate to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century. Typographi­ cal errors of any sort are exceedingly rare in the paper, and the grosser mistakes common in most newspapers of that age and our own-mis­ placement of whole lines or paragraphs, for example-are simply not found. The Luzacs must have understood intuitively that inaccuracies in detail would cast doubt on the paper's reputation for accuracy on more important matters: the exterior appearance of the text had to match its content. Such a result could only be obtained with a workforce large enough to allow for a reasonable pace of work and proper attention to tasks such as redistributing the tiny petit romain and petit texte characters properly after use. Not only did the Gazette de Leyde's diligent compositors carefully avoid errors, they also followed some complicated typographical conventions designed to make the paper easier to read, although to modern eyes, it seems to lack the devices that today's newspapers use to make their copy easily legible. It is true that the Luzacs resolutely ignored the experi­ ments in typographical design in England and in the Netherlands dur­ ing this period which foreshadowed modern newspaper design, such as individual titles for specific stories and various forms of typographical ornaments or rules to separate stories. Because the Gazette de Leyde carried little advertising, and what it did carry was always confined to a single block at the bottom of the last page of the ordinaire, its pages did not have the distinctive mosaic appearance of the London papers, whose front page was often partially or totally covered with ads, each beginning with an oversized initial. Nor did the Gazette de Leyde ever emulate the common practice of the Dutch-language papers in running advertise­ ments sideways in the spaces between news columns. These English and Dutch expedients were steps on the road to sepa­ rating newspaper typography from book layout. They showed some recognition of what English printing historian Stanley Morison called "the fundamental problem of newspaper display: to order the material for rapid reading." By the mid- 1 780s, English newspaper publishers, such as John Walter I, founder of the Times, were coming to realize that "the book is composed on the understanding that it will be read atten15.

Eeghen, "Amsterdamsche Courant," 35.

Producing a Newspaper in the Eighteenth Century

• (1 11 • •' 0 X X V L

N O U V E L L E S E X T R A O R DIN A I R IS D E

D I V E R S . E N D R O I T S· du MARDI

I.

Avril , 1 771 .

Front page of a copy of the Gautte de Leyde. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

tively," whereas "the newspaper must be set-up on the understanding that it will be read inattentively. Moreover, the book is composed for consecutive, the newspaper for inconsecutive reading; the nature of the book-page is homogeneous, of the newspaper, heterogeneous." 1 6 The Luzacs, and the French-language press both inside and outside the kingdom in general, remained more conservative and adhered to tradi­ tions of typographical form overtly derived from book composition. Even the French Revolution led to only modest experiments in news­ paper layout: it was during the Napoleonic period that the basic princi­ ple of laying out the paper as though it were to be read consecutively from the top of the left-hand column of the front page to the bottom of the right-hand column on the last page was finally abandoned in the French-language press. 1 7 Within the limits of this conservative tradition, however, the Gautte de Leyde had gradually adopted some innovations that made the newspaper of Jean Luzac's day much more readable than its late-seventeenth­ century predecessors. These conventions were so modest, compared to the large-type headlines, the illustrations, and the jigsaw puzzle format that newspapers adopted during the nineteenth century, that they can easily pass unnoticed by today's reader, but when one immerses oneself in the text, one gradually becomes aware of how much the typography in the Gautte de Leyde actually does facilitate the rapid digestion of the content; it is a shock to move from the Luzacs' paper to an eighteenth­ century text that lacks such aids to reading. The seventeenth-century Gazette de Leyde had been set entirely in a single typeface, and news bulletins from a given source were set without paragraph indentations , regardless of length. Etienne Luzac had taken to printing the lengthy documents that were the paper's specialty in a typeface smaller than the paper's standard body type: this saved space and also distinguished the documents from the ordinary news items, even if it did make the docu­ ments harder to read. The block of advertising copy in the ordinaire came to be distinguished from the news because it was set in long lines, unlike the rest of that section, and in italic type. Although the paper still used no headlines or titles, the headings on stories had become somewhat larger and more varied. By Jean Luzac's day, the Gautte de Leyde distinguished between "lettres," which were usually the longer newsletters from his correspondents, and "nou­ velles," shorter reports whose source may have been other newspapers. The headings on longer items were set in a mixture of types: thus a 1 6. Stanley Morison, The English Newspaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1 932), 1 84-85.

1 7. On French newspaper design during the Revolution, see Jeremy D. Popkin, "Une reprise en main et un nouveau depart: La presentation de texte dans les joumaux entre 1 794 et 1 807," in Pierre Retat, ed ., Tex.tologit du joumal (Paris: Minard, 1 989).

Producing a Newspaper in the Eighteenth Century heading in a typical issue from 1 772 reads "SUITE des Nouvelles de STOK­ HOLM du 4 Septembre. " Such headings stand out even though the type was no larger than that employed for the story itself. Longer items were broken into paragraphs, which generally corresponded to distinct topics, and within these paragraphs, proper names and direct quota­ tions were set in italics. The GazeUe de Leyde was also generous with capital letters at the beginning of nouns, coming closer to German practice than to modem French habits in this regard. A typical line from a news dispatch printed in 1 77 2 reads: "Hier, iI se tint a WhitehaU une grande Conference entre les Ministres d'Etat: La Colonie projettee sur I'Ohio en a fait l'objet. " 1 8 All these typographical conventions, minor though they seem in retrospect, made definite contributions to the legibility of the paper. Ensuring that the compositors could set enough of this intricately patterned type for the paper required careful scheduling. The Luzacs had the first half of each issue printed a day in advance of the second because this spread the work of composing and printing the paper more evenly through the week and made the most efficient use of both man­ power and machinery. Had the entire paper been printed on the day before it was released, as a daily newspaper is, they would have needed twice as many compositors, pressmen, and presses and the workers and the presses would have been idle five days out of seven. With the pro­ cedure they actually adopted, a smaller workforce could be kept going at optimal speed for at least four days out of seven, and the two "off' days would have been needed for such jobs as cleaning and redistributing type, as they were in the Amsterdamsche Courant's shop. But such a schedule complicated the task of making the .paper as timely as possible by lengthening the production process. Jean Luzac had to plan carefully to minimize the disadvantages of this procedure. Careful examination of typical issues of the Gazette de Leyde shows that each issue was an intricate mosaic of items, some set in type well in advance of the printing deadline, and others composed as close to press time as possible. A few items in each issue were either permanently on hand or could be prepared a week or more in advance: the half-page logo with the paper's title and the provincial coat of arms, of course, and the block of advertising copy that normally occupied the lower half of page 4 . 1 9 The front page of the supplement (page 5) also contained material that could be set in advance. It typically began with a paragraph of editorial comment, datelined Leiden, followed by the reproduction of one or more substantial documents bearing on some major ongoing 18. GL, 22 Sept. 1 772. 1 9. Copies from a year of peak circulation, 1 78g, show that the Gautte de Ltyde had at least three different logo blocks, which can be differentiated from each other on the basis of the size of the type in the title.

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News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

news story-proclamations of the Continental Congress during the American Revolution, for instance. Many of the smaller news items had probably also been set in type some time in advance of printing. The first news story in the left-hand column on page 1 was almost always of this sort. Rarely a major item, such as the beginning of the newsletter from Paris or London, this was usually a report from some distant part of the world, such as Constantinople or Algiers, which took so long to reach Leiden that there was no need to rush it into print. Very likely Luzac also favored putting such news in this prominent location because the begin­ ning item could be shortened if necessary to make way for more signifi­ cant news. The heart of each issue of the Gazette de Leyde was made up not of such relatively short news items from exotic places, but of lengthy newsletters from major European capitals, most often Paris and London. These newsletters were often accompanied by substantial documents-parlia­ mentary speeches from England, or parlementary remonstrances from France. These documents were often so long that they had to be printed in installments over several issues, and because of the very small type used, they involved a great deal of slow, painstaking composition. The newsletters were the items to be printed as quickly as possible, and, as a result, they were undoubtedly the last material to be set in type. The newsletters were uS4ally concentrated on the interior pages of the or­ dinaire and the supplement-that is, pages 2-3 and 6-7 of the paper­ suggesting that the printer laid out those pages first, observing how much additional room would be needed on the exterior pages for the rest of the vital last-minute newsletters and choosing shorter stories already set in type to fill the remaining space on those pages. The foreman in the Luzacs' shop worked on the four pages of each issue's ordinaire first, often using material from a Paris or London news­ letter that had already been partially printed in the previous issue. In a typical issue, the copy of 2 June 1 786, the main feature of the ordinaire was an "extract of a letter from Paris" dated 2 2 May 1 786, which began halfway down the right-hand column of page 2 and ended halfway down the left-hand column of page 3 (see Figure 1 ) . This was followed by three full columns of a document, a section of the lawyer Target's memoire on behalf of Cardinal de Rohan in the Diamond Necklace case, which gave the appearance of being directly related to the Paris newslet­ ter. In fact, it was an installment of a document that had arrived in Leiden more than a week earlier, and which the paper's compositors could have been working on well in advance of the deadline for the June 2 issue. Page 1 and the left-hand column of page 2 were taken up by a set of items from the Iberian peninsula, datelined Algiers, 1 5 April ; Lisbon, 2 May; Cadiz, 28 April ; and Madrid, 9 May. All had presumably reached

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Producing a Newspaper in the Eighteenth Century FilJUre

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the paper in a single packet, sent via Madrid, and since the most recent was already more than three weeks old, they were typical of material the editor could hold over for one or more issues without making it appear stale. Consequently, there was nothing in the ordinaire for this particular issue that was likely to have arrived in the office less than a week before the paper's date of publication. In other words, the ordinaire for this issue had undoubtedly been locked up and sent to press well before the final deadline for the paper, a situation most satisfying for all concerned. When there was too much pressing news to be contained solely in the supplement, however, the most recent newsletter from Paris or London might be started in the ordinaire. If this newsletter was fleshed out sufficiently with documents that had been received earlier, the ordinaire could appear to give late-breaking news while in fact containing only a column or so of material composed on a rush basis.

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News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

With the ordinaire out of the way, the paper's printers, fortified no doubt by ample portions of the beer, coffee, and tea that Etienne Luzac was obliged to furnish them, turned their attention to the supplement, which would be printed twenty-four hours later. Its interior pages usu­ ally contained the latest-breaking news that the paper was going to carry. In the case of the issue of 2 June 1 786, this consisted of Paris and London newsletters dated 26 May-that is, four days later than any material contained in the ordinaire of the same issue. Because the paper arranged for twice-weekly newsletters from both major capitals, this was one mail delivery later than that which had brought the Paris newsletter excerpted in the ordinaire. Mail from both London and Paris took about three days to reach Leiden, so Luzac would have received his 26 May newsletters on the twenty-ninth, leaving three days to get them set up in type and printed. For the 2 June 1 786 issue, he had the lower half of page 5 and the upper half of page 6 filled with late-breaking Paris news, and then helped himself to another generous slice of the lengthy memoire concerning Cardinal de Rohan, finishing out page 7 with the first few lines of his latest dispatch from London. He had already taken care of the top of page 5 with some short items from Stockholm, Naples, and Berlin, of which only the Berlin letter seems likely to have arrived in the interval since the previous paper. The bottom of page 8 carried an installment of the official program of the Amsterdam society for the improvement of agriculture. A few lines of editorial comment that Jean Luzac had dashed off, datelined I June, were inserted into the middle of page 8 . They constituted the only item of truly last-minute copy in the paper, and served to assure readers that their paper had been put to bed as late as possible. With that, the supplement was ready to go to press. Yet even as he handed over the copy for each issue, Luzac was already in possession of more up-to-date material. Some issues of the paper carried small stop-press items at the bottom of page 4 or page 8 which prove that another mail delivery from Paris or London had already arrived in Leiden. But only a tremendously important news story justified the delaying of the printing process to incorporate urgent last-minute infor­ mation into the paper. The actual printing of the paper, like the typesetting, required skilled and dedicated workers. In eighteenth-century book production, the normal ratio of composers to pressmen was about one to one, but the Dutch newspaper enterprises of the eighteenth century employed many more compositors per press.20 However many pressmen the Gazette de Leyde may have employed, the paper probably tried to get by with only 20. The Amstndamsche Courant needed only two pressmen to put out its three weekly issues in 6.000 copies apiece. and the Of1rechte Haarlnnse Courant typically paid out four times as much in wages to compositors as it did to pressmen. Eeghen. "Amsterdamsche . Courant." 36; Couvee. "The Administration of the 'Oprechte Haarlemse Courant . 1 07 . .•

Producing a Newspaper in the Eighteenth Century one set of forms for the ordinaire and one for the supplement: two sets of forms meant a doubling of the number of compositors and a steep increase in printing costs. In 1 789, .the year when the paper's profits and, presumably, its circulation hit an all-time high, the Luzacs were forced to set the copy for the paper twice in order to meet demand, but this does not seem to have been the case in more normal years.2 1 Even when all the copies were printed from a single set of forms, the time needed to produce the paper could not be compressed. Indeed, the more successful the paper became and the larger the press run, the harder it was to fit late-breaking news into the forms. In the mid- I 780s, when the paper was selling more than 4,000 copies of each issue, requir­ ing more than 8,000 pulls of the press,22 it would have taken a team of pressmen considerable time to work their way through the printing of the paper. True, newspaper pressmen worked fast: Leiden printer David Wardenaar boasted that when he had to, he had "done 250 sheets on one side in a half an hour . . . many times," so that his partner "barely had enough time to smear the letters [with ink]." The duc de Croy claimed to have witnessed the printers of the Courrier de l'Europe putting out 7,000 copies of the paper in six hours.23 But normal printing work proceeded less quickly. The STN press teams of two men averaged between 1 0,000 and 1 6,000 printed sides, or 5,000 to 8,000 completed sheets, in a six-day work week.24 At a press run of 4,000, the Gazette de Leyde would have required 1 6,000 printed sides for its two issues a week, just about the maximum that single press team could produce under ideal conditions. But as Wardenaar emphasized, conditions for news­ paper printing were rarely ideal. Papers often had to be printed at night, when the lower temperatures made the ink harder to work with.25 Skill 2 1 . A comparison of the copies of the paper in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and the Leiden University Library for the dates of6 and 1 3 Feb. 1 789 shows that they were printed from different forms, although their text is identical. The Library of Con­ gress collection for 1 789 also has copies using two different fonts of body type, one considerably more worn than the other, suggesting that the increased demand for the paper had forced the Luzacs to double their type supply. 2 2 . The Gautte de Ltyde was printed in quarto format, so that after being run through the press twice (to print each side), each printed sheet of paper yielded two complete copies of either the urdinaire or the supplement. Thus 4,000 copies of the ordinaire were produced by running 2 ,000 sheets of paper through the press, turning the sheets over and rotating them 1 80 degrees, and running them through the press again, and then cutting the sheets in half to produce 4,000 urdinaiTes, each one consisting of a half-sheet of paper printed on both sides. Because each subscriber's copy of the paper included two sections, this whole process had to be carried out twice for each issue; hence the figure of 8,000 pulls of the press to produce a press run of 4,000 complete copies. 2 3. Janssen, ed. , DrukIcen, 427; "Journal du Duc de Croy," in Bibliotheque de l'Institut (Paris), Ms. 1 675, entry of 26 Aug. 1 779. The duc de Croy had visited the CO'UTTier de l'Europe's shop in Boulogne. Unfortunately, he does not indicate how many presses and pressmen were needed to work off that paper's press run. 24. Rychner, "Ombre," 1 94 2 . 25. Janssen, ed., Drukken , 3 1 5 .

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News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

was needed to obtain a clean impression from forms filled with small­ sized type. It seems unlikely that a single pair of men could have handled the paper's work load; unlike the single team that managed to manhan­ dle a press into producing the three-day-a-week Amsterdamsche Courant, these men would have had to work more than twelve hours on two consecutive days twice every week. We can safely conclude that the Gazette de Leyde needed two teams of pressmen, essentially one for the ordinaire and one for the supplement of each issue. Each team would have been responsible for putting out slightly more than 8,000 sheets of printed paper a week, a load well within the known capacities of the printing equipment available to them, although they must have been working up a healthy sweat on the nights before publication. The printing of the paper was carried out according to standard procedures. Each copy of the ordinaire or the supplement occupied only a half-sheet. The printers working on either of the paper's two sections had a form on the marble of their press containing blocks of type representing all four pages of that section. The type for pages 1 and 4 would have been on one half of the form, the type for pages 2 and 3 on the other, with the heads of all four pages toward the middle of the form. The printers would take full sheets of paper and print half the number necessary to make up the paper's required press run. They would then turn the sheets over, rotate them 1 80 degrees, and run them through the press again. In this way, the half of each sheet that had already received the impressions for pages 1 and 4 would receive the impressions of pages 2 and 3 on the backs of those pages during its second run. The other half of the sheet, already printed with pages 2 and 3, would end up with pages 1 and 4 on its second pass through the press.26 The full sheets, each containing, like any printed sheet in quarto format, eight pages of impression (four on the front and four on the back), would then be cut in half, each one yielding two copies of the section of the Gazette de Leyde it represented. Surviving copies of the paper bear the telltale sign of this printing method: they have been cut just above the top of the printed area, whereas their left, right, and bottom margins are somewhat more generous. Assuming that the Ga­ zette de Leyde, like some other eighteenth-century papers, used a press modified so that all four pages of a quarto form could be printed with a single pull of the bar, this method was the most rapid and efficient available for producing the number of copies the paper needed. This twice-a-week rush to print conditioned every aspect of Jean Luzac's newspaper. Out of the seven or eight days that normally elapsed 26. The German newspaper historian Martin Welke has verified the use of this tech­ nique by finding an uncut proof sheet for an eighteenth-century German paper. the WoIfmbii.t1er te Uitung. in the city archives at Wolfenbuttel (personal communication).

Producing a Newspaper in the Eighteenth Century between the occurrence of a major event in Paris or London and the publication of a report in Leiden, at least three represented the time necessary for printing after the news reached Luzac's desk. Further­ more, the limit on the amount of type that could actually be set on a rush basis just before the paper went to press meant that only a small portion of each issue's contents could be even that fresh. The Gazette de Leyde rarely had more than two genuine newsletters from correspondents in any one issue, and these rarely furnished more than 25 to 30 percent of the paper's total contents. Even if Luzac could have collected more fast­ breaking news from around the world, he still could not have used it without hiring several additional compositors who would then be unem­ ployed most of the week. The nature of the printing process thus forced Luzac, and all other newspaper editors of the period, to be extremely selective and to limit the quantity of the "freshest advices" they actually placed in their paper; the constraints of technology made the recruit­ ment of a really extensive network of correspondents a useless luxury. There were ways in which newspapers relying on the same printing equipment as the Gazette de Leyde could expand the number of copies that could be printed and the amount of late news they could contain. But these alternatives required sufficient income to employ more type­ setters and printers. Simply raising the paper's subscription price would have been difficult: competition would mean lost sales to cheaper rivals. Income could be obtained by allowing the paper to become dependent on political subsidies, as the London dailies and the Courrier de l'Europe were, or by greatly increasing the amount of advertising. The latter strategy was adopted by the most widely circulated European newspaper in Luzac's day, the German-language Hamburg Correspondent, which achieved its press run of over 20,000 around the time of the French Revolution by employing up to six printing presses. But it managed to pay for this extravagance by filling half its pages with advertising, and its weekly "news hole" was actually smaller than that of the Gazette de Leyde. The daily papers of the French Revolution also used multiple printing presses: in 1 792 , the Gazette universelle of Luzac's former Paris corre­ spondent Pascal Boyer and his one-time editor Cerisier had eight to ten presses to handle its print run of 1 1 ,000 copies.27 It probably needed four sets of forms each day, and would have required a workforce at least four times the size of the Gazette de Leyde's. The Moniteur, the largest of the French revolutionary papers (each four-page folio-sized issue oc­ cupied a full printing sheet, not simply a half-sheet), needed an even larger printing establishment. Even so, it could not set type fast enough to keep up with the latest news and settled for publishing its accounts of 27. Dumont-Pigalle toJohan Va1ckenaer, 2 1 Aug. 1 792, in LUL, Ms. BPL 1 03 1 (1), ff. 36.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution the revolutionary assemblies' debates one or more days late. In 1 794, the printing shop responsible for putting out the Moniteur had twenty-seven presses, thirty-seven compositors, and fifty-four pressmen.28 Only the development of power-driven printing machinery in the nineteenth century allowed journalists to expand substantially the amount of late­ breaking information they could accommodate in their papers, while simultaneously increasing their press runs (thereby raising income) and enlarging their papers. Modest as its regular portion of up-to-the-minute news was, the Ga­ zette de Leyde represented an outstanding achievement for a news enter­ prise forced to rely on the wooden printing press and unable to afford the expanded workforce employed by the large London and Paris dailies. To be sure, the Luzacs did not try to achieve the fastest results possible with their equipment: they could not afford to demand her­ culean efforts from their staff every week. Furthermore, they demanded exceedingly high standards in their finished product. One has only to compare the neat, errorless columns of a typical number of the Gazette de Leyde with the pages of any Parisian daily during the French Revolution to see how many typographical errors, jumbled lines and paragraphs, and other mistakes were bound to creep into papers that had to meet the more demanding requirements of daily publication. But compared to other sorts of printing jobs in the eighteenth century, the production of the Gazette de Leyde was already a hurried procedure. The masses of miniscule gray type wedged into its columns twice a week represent one of the outstanding technical achievements of eighteenth-century typog­ raphy, fit to take their place alongside the fine editions of a Baskerville or a Didot. Distribution and Marketin g

Once the Gazette de Leyde 's pressmen had completed their work, the paper was sent throughout Europe. To do this, the paper relied on the postal systems of the states in which it circulated. Most copies were destined for export, but the Dutch post carried them as far as the frontier. Each Dutch newspaper publisher had to negotiate an annual contract with the directors of the post, bargaining for the best rate he could get. In 1 7 7 2 , the Luzacs had signed an agreement with the Dutch postal carriers specifying an annual charge of 600 gulden for the trans­ port of their shipments to the three frontier points leading to France and southern and northern Germany. With increases to allow for the 28. Robert Darnton, "L'imprimerie de Panckoucke en I'an I I ," Revue fra7l(jaise d'histoire du livre 9 ( 1 979), 365.

Producing a Newspaper in the Eighteenth Century growing weight of the paper's bundles, this contract remained in effect until the abolition of all special postal concessions after the Batavian Revolution.29 Beyond the frontiers, the paper's bundles became the responsibility of the distribution agents in the receiving countries, either the postmasters or, in the French case, a privileged vendor. These distributors received a healthy commission for their services. Indeed, the cost of postage was the major part of an international journal's subscription price. In 1 770, Pierre Gosse, one of the Luzacs' Dutch competitors, offered his Swiss distributor copies of his Gazette de La Haye for the wholesale price of 1 1 livres, 1 4 sous per copy; the subscription price was 36 livres, and the difference was meant to cover the distribu­ tor's profit and the cost of transportation. so The distributors in turn remitted payments to the publisher, usually once a year. The system posed great risks for the newspaper publishers. When he took over the paper in 1 738, the elder Etienne Luzac inherited an unpaid balance owed by the Prussian postmaster in Emmerich that amounted to nearly four times the paper's annual profits; for a time, this loss alone threat­ ened to bankrupt the paper.S ) The records show that in 1 745-49, payments from just two of the more than ninety distributors accounted for more than half of total sales. Defaults by distributors averaged more than 700 gulden a year, about a twelfth of gross revenues.S2 From 1 759, foreign newspaper sales in France were handled by a special arrangement. A privileged bookseller, David, had been given a monopoly for the distribution of all foreign gazettes. His Bureau gen­ eral des gazettes etrangeres sold the papers in Paris both by subscription and through street vendors, and transshipped copies bound for the French provinces.Ss To accommodate subscribers in provincial towns closer to Leiden, David apparently granted booksellers or postmasters a franchise to receive the paper directly. s4 This arrangement normally ran smoothly, but there were occasional problems. In 1 779-80, the 29. The 1 772 contract is in AR, Derde Afdeling, Familiearchief Le Jeune ( 1 747- 1 8 1 0), inv. no. 27 1 ; Overvoorde, Postweun, 1 27- 1 28. 30. Pierre Gosse, Jr., to STN , 31 Aug. 1 770, in Bibliotheque publique et universitaire, Neuchatel, STN Archive, Ms. 1 1 59, ff. 1 32-33. 3 1 . Etienne Luzac to Frederic I I of Prussia, 6 Mar. 1 744, in LGA-VH, Z( I ), no. 22. Profit figure from petition to Stadholder, n.d., in ibid., no. 25. 3 2 . Profit statements for 1 745-49, in ibid., no. 29. Unfortunately, the distributors are not identified by location. It is also unfortunate that no comparable documents record the distribution of the paper in Jean Luzac's day. One would suppose that the two largest shipments went to Paris and to the Prussian postmaster at Emmerich who handled distribution in northern Germany, Poland, and the rest of the Baltic. 33. An "Avis aux Colporteurs," dated 1 5 Sept. 1 759, announced the creation of the new monopoly and informed the street vendors that they would pay a wholesale price of 1 2 50US per copy of the foreign papers. BN, Anisson-Duperron, Ms. fro 2 2084, f. I l l . 34. See the lists of subscription points in GL, 24 May 1 768 (seventeen cities) and 24 Dec. 1 784 (nineteen French cities plus Geneva).

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

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Luzacs quarreled with the Bureau general about who was responsible for paying the increased cost of postal transport in Belgium.55 In 1 783, they complained that French sales were falling off and suspected the French government of tolerating a counterfeit edition; the Bureau gen­ eral's agent assured them that all the international papers had lost sales with the ending of the American war. 56 By jean Luzac's day, the Gazette de Leyde was a well-known title with a century of continuous publication behind it; to a large extent, the paper sold itself. There is no indication that the Luzacs felt any need to circulate prospectuses or advertise in other publications, the way the backers of newly created periodicals did. Local distributors, on the other hand, frequently did advertise the full list of periodicals for which they took subscriptions. The French Bureau general issued regular prospec­ tuses listing all the newspapers it handled, their prices, and the days on which they arrlved.37 The publishers of the Annonces, Affiches et Avis Divers pour la Ville de Marseille, who doubled as subscription agents for out-of-town periodicals, issued an annual notice to clients when it was time to renew their subscriptions, noting that otherwise "we are some­ times exposed to unmerited reproaches from forgetful subscribers. "58 In this way, the Gazette de Leyde profited from the growth of local periodi­ cals throughout Europe: rather than competing with the international gazettes, these provincial advertisers, ever more numerous in the 1 770S and 1 780s, offered a useful channel of publicity for them.

The Gazette de Leyde as a Business Enterprise Not having to organize their own distribution system simplified the administrative affairs of the Gazette de Leyde considerably for the Luzacs. Nevertheless, bookkeeping was a necessary part of the paper's business. The contract of 1 783 assigned the task of corresponding with distribu­ tors and keeping the books to the paper's printer, jean Luzac's brother Etienne. As co-owner of the newspaper, jean Luzac was guaranteed a right to inspect the books. Until the two brothers had a falling-out over politics after 1 795, the division of the profits apparently went smooth­ ly.59 Except for drafting letters to government officials when the paper's 35. Letter of De Lopes. postmaster at Brussels. to GL. 10 June 1 779. reply. and letter of 4 Sept. 1 780. in LGA-VH. Z( 1 ). nos. 43-45. It is not clear how this dispute was resolved. 36. De Lonnes to GL. 1 4 July 1 783. in LGA-VH . Z( I). no. 55. 37 . Prospectus. 1 763. in BN. Anisson-Duperron. Ms. fro 2 2084. f. 1 1 3. 38. 1 2 Dec. 1 776. In 1 773. the Marseille bureau had advertised twenty-one different periodicals. including the Gautu de Ltyde and all its rivals. In 1 774. it offered seventeen. 39. Contract. 18 Feb. 1 783. in LGA-VH. Z(2). no. 5 1 . De Lonnes (Paris agent) to GL.

Producing a Newspaper in the Eighteenth Century

[ 1 1 7]

circulation was interrupted for political reasons, Jean Luzac had little concern with the business side of the paper. The business affairs of the Gazette de Leyde were uncomplicated, par­ ticularly in comparison with the British papers of the period, which were usually structured as joint partnerships with as many as a dozen shares.4o The paper's income came almost entirely from subscription sales, forwarded by the various postmasters and booksellers. Payments for advertisements, the paper's only other source of income, amounted to less than 3 percent of the gross income.4 1 Expenses generally fell into simple categories: acquisition of paper, maintenance of printing equip­ ment, wages for the printers, and payments to the city government. The Gazette de Leyde's registers do not seem to have been preserved, but if one estimates the costs for paper and labor as about the same as the Amster­ d4msche Courant, for which such records do exist, we can construct a hypothetical balance sheet that yields annual profit figures in the neigh­ borhood of those given in the remaining documents in the paper's archives (see Figure 2). These hypothetical calculations leave a balance of 68,850 gulden. Jean Luzac's actual figures for the paper's net profit in 1 783-86 range from approximately 1 4,000 to 1 9,000 gulden. The difference, a figure representing about half the paper's gross income, probably went to the postal services and agents who distributed the paper.42 Since the record books of the Gazette de Leyde do not seem to have been preserved, there is necessarily a large margin of uncertainty in these calculations, but they do demonstrate that the figures given in the Luzacs' papers for the enterprise's net profits are consistent with what we know about the actual costs of producing a newspaper in the eighteenth-century Neth­ erlands. As a business enterprise, the Gazette de Leyde was highly profitable. The 1 783 contract between Etienne Luzac and his nephews specified that when the elder Luzac died, they were to buy out their uncle's stake in the business by putting up 8,000 gulden each to provide the paper with working capital.43 This was a large sum, more than five times what Jean Luzac paid for a house for himself and his family in 1 790.44 But the investment was well worth it: during the four years in which they had to 40. Michael Harris, "The Management of the London Newspaper Press during the Eighteenth Century," Publishing History 4 ( 1 978), 95- 1 1 2. 4 1 . Figures for 1 783-86, from "Portie van Oom in de affaire," in LUL, Luzac, carton 30. 42. The letten of Pierre Gosse, Jr., publisher of the Gazette de la Haye, to STN show him offering them bulk orden of his paper for a third of the retail price. But the more successful Gazette de Leyde may have been able to negotiate a more favorable contract with its postal services. Gosse, letter of 3 1 Aug. 1 770, in Bibliotheque publique et universitaire de Neuchiltel, STN Archive, Ms. 1 1 59. 43. Article 2 of contract in LGA-VH, Z(2), no. 5 1 . 44· Knappert, "Gedenksteen," 1 1 3·

[ 1 1 8]

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

Figure 2. Hypothetical annual balance sheet for the Gautle de Leyde Income (gulden)

Subscriptions (5,000) Advertisements Total

Expenditures (gulden) 90,000 � 90,750

Wages I Paper2 Misc.! Correspondents4 Payment to city Editors Misc. losses6 To. M. J. Luzac7 Total

C· 4,000 c. 2 , 1 00 500 9,000 3,000 2 ,000 500 800 2 1 ,900

I . Based on wage rates for Amsterdamsche Courant in 1 767, on the assumption that the paper employed one foreman at 10 gulden per week, four compositors at 8.5 gulden per week each, four pressmen at 6.5 gulden per week each, and one apprentice at 6 gulden per week. Figures in this and the following note from Eeghen, "Amsterdamsche Courant," 35-36. 2 . In 1 770, the Amstmlamsche Courant paid 36 stuivers ( 1 .8 gulden) per ream for ordinary newsprint: 5,000 copies of the Gazette de Leyde came to 10 reams per issue, and there were 1 05 issues per year, making a total of 1 ,050 reams. I have assumed a price of 2 gulden per ream to simplify calculations. 3. Specified in the 1 783 contract, LGA-VH, Z(2), no. 5 1 . 4 . I n the 1 7805, the Paris correspondent, Boyer, earned 1 ,500 gulden (3,000 livres) a year, and the equally active London correspondent presumably earned a comparable salary. If the paper maintained eight less-active correspondents paid 750 gulden a year (a figure extrapolated from the known payments to Baudus, the Hamburg correspondent, for 1 794), the total in this category would have come to about 9,000 gulden a year. This may be the expenditure represented in Jean Luzac's notes on the paper's expenses for the years 1 783-87 ("Portie van Oom in de affaire," LUL, Luzac, carton 30), which include an annual item, "Fraix et depenses," which ranges from 7,500 to 1 0,000 gulden per year. 5. Figure guaranteed to Jean Luzac, beyond his share of the profits, under the 1 783 contract. 6. Defaults from subscription agencies and advertisers. Figures based on figures shown in Luzac's notes on "Portie van Oom in de affaire." 7. The 1 783 contract specified an annual payment to one Martha Jacob Luzac of 500 gulden plus the profit on one hundred subscriptions and one-third of the profit from advertising.

split the profits with their uncle, the two nephews earned close to half their original investment every year, and once they became the sole owners in 1 787, they recouped more than 1 00 percent of their stake annually until the unforeseen events of the French Revolution drove profits down (see Table 3). In addition to demonstrating that the Luzac brothers did very well running their newspaper, the figures in Table 3 show that the Gazette de Leyde was one of the most successful newspapers in the Western world. A major London daily, the Morning Chronicle, had a profit equivalent to 1 8,000 gulden in 1 785, just about the same figure as the Leiden paper,

Producing a Newspaper in the Eighteenth Century

[ 1 1 9]

Table ]. Annual profit of Gautte de u,de, 1 783- 1 805 1 (gulden) 1 783 1 784 1 785 1 786 1 787 1 788 1 789 1 790

1 3,999 1 5,477 1 7,0 1 0 1 9,500 22 ,goo 2 7,500 29,400 2 2 ,goo

1791 1 792 1 793 1 794 1 795 1 796 1 797 1 798

1 7,700 1 7,600 26,600 2 2 ,700 1 3,200 1 5,300 1 3,400 1 0, 1 00

1 799 1 800 1 80 1 1 802 1 803 1 804 1 805

9,300 6,000 6,900 6,600 7,600 9,500 6,500

1 . Figures from sheet headed "Portie van Oom i n de affaire," apparently Jean Luzac's calculations of his uncle's share of the paper's profits in the four years from the time the nephews took over the running of the paper in 1 783 to the death of the elder Etienne Luzac in January 1 787 (in LUL, Luzac, carton 30) and from the figures the younger Etienne Luzac submitted to the Dutch government during negotiations for sale of the paper in 1 807 (in LGA-VH, Z[2], no. 1 1 9). There is a small discrepancy in the figures for 1 786, the only year for which the two sources overlap: Jean Luzac's detailed calculations give a profit figure of 1 8,947 gulden, whereas his brother's figures, which have clearly been rounded off, list 1 9,500 gulden, which approximates the figure that would result from adding Jean Luzac's total for unpaid bills from 1 786 to his figure for net profits.

and in 1 780 the Gazette de France, with 1 2 ,000 subscriptions, returned a profit equal to only 5 ,905 gulden. The Coumer d'Avignon's annual prof­ its never topped the equivalent of 1 0,000 gulden per year and they probably averaged considerably less.45 The Gazette de Leyde was a very substantial enterprise, equal to the other major papers of the European world. Certainly it prospered so handsomely in the last years of the Old Regime that Jean and Etienne Luzac had very little reason to tinker with the journalistic formula that was bringing them such success. They accepted the technological restrictions that limited the paper's press run and the amount of news it could carry because they were thus able to make large profits on a modest investment and with very little risk. 45. Figures for Morning Chronicle from Ian R. Christie, Myth and � in I...au Eightemth­ Century British Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 970), 3110; for Gazetll de Franu see Denise Aime Azam, "Le Ministere des Affaires etrangeres et la presse a la fin de I'ancien regime," Cahiers de /a pruse 1 ( 1 938), 430; for Courrier d'Avignon see Moulinas, L'imprimerie, 354-59. Both the Gazetll de Franu and the Courrier d'Avignon had to pay large sums to the governments that licensed them; the Morning Chronicle and other British papers also paid heavily for the right to publish through the stamp tax and a steep tax on advertisements. But the Gazetll de Leyde also paid the Leiden government handsomely for its privilege.

[6] The

Gazette de Leyde's

Readership

C opies of the GazeUe de Leyde left Leiden to circle the world: from the Netherlands to Philadelphia, and via Vienna and Aleppo, Syria, to India. Subscribers were of course thinly and unevenly spread across the globe, and they made up a minority of the reading public even in those countries where the paper was most popular, but the steady flow of subscription orders, reflected in the paper's substantial profits, assured Luzac that there were eager recipients for his product. N umbers and Distribution

The Gazette de Leyde's total press run varied from year to year, depend­ ing on the public's interest in the paper's news and the nature of the competition. When Jean Luzac briefly experimented with leaving the paper to a hired editor, in the mid- 1 780s, the press run appears to have been around 4,200. 1 This put the paper in the same league as the most 1 . When Antoine Cerisier was hired to edit the paper in 1 785, his salary was set at 1 ,400 gulden a year, with a bonus of 50 gulden for each additional 100 subscriptions sold. If the base rate for his salary was calculated on the same basis of 50 gulden for each 1 00 subscriptions, the press run i n 1 785, when h e received a 600 gulden bonus, would have been 4,000 copies per issue. If the 1 ,400 gulden payment to Cerisier listed for 1 786 represented a bonus, the press run that year would have been 5,600. Figures from LUL, Luzac, carton 30, "Portie van Oom in de affaire," a set of figures for the paper's profits from 1 783 to 1 786. These figures are in the same range as those derived from records of the paper's payments to the Dutch post office for the mailing of copies. Dutch postal historian Overvoorde, using a figure of 10 grams per copy, calculates that for 1 788, the paper's payment of 1 ,464 gulden represented postage for 7,330 copies per issue, although he notes that Luzac may have paid extra postage on copies sent to distant destinations.

[ 1 20]

The Gazetle de Leyde's Readership

[121]

successful Dutch-language papers, such as the Oprechte Haarlemsche Cou­ rant, whose press run was about 6,000, and the most successful London newspapers, whose sales were about 4,500 in this period. The Gazette de Leyde's press run was considerably below that of the Hamburg Correspon­ dent, whose 20,000 copies per issue probably made it the most widely read newspaper in the world up to 1 789.2 The figure for the late 1 780s represented a considerable increase over the sales in the early 1 770s, when Jean Luzac took over the paper. Sales certainly rose during the years of the American war. The number of subscriptions in France alone had been only 287 copies in 1 767, and 300 in 1 773, but it climbed to 2 ,560 in 1 778, slumping to 1 490 when peace broke out in 1 783.3 The prerevolutionary crisis in France also stimu­ lated sales. The paper's net profits rose nearly 50 percent from 1 786, when they stood at 1 9,500 gulden, to 1 789, when they reached 29,400 gulden, the paper's all-time high (see Table 3). Profits then dropped sharply in the first few years of the French Revolution, due to the loss of the French market, but the outbreak of war in 1 792 brought profits of 26,600 gulden in 1 793. The figure fell to 1 3,200 in 1 795, however, and never rose above 1 5,300 again. Whether this reduction reflected falling sales, rising expenses, or both cannot be determined. During the Napo­ leonic period, the paper continued its decline. By 1 8 1 0, when it had become an official publication of Louis Bonaparte's government, the press run had fallen to a mere 400.4 The total audience of the Gazetle de Leyde was not tied to the number of copies printed in Leiden, however. In the first place, these were not the only copies in circulation. Throughout the paper's life, pirate reprints diminished the sales of the original ; yet by offering distant subscribers a cheaper version, they probably increased its total readership. In 1 79 1 , Luzac complained that there were five or six such pirate editions.5 The Vienna reprint, which appeared from 1 786 to 1 79 2 , had an official privilege granted by Joseph II. In 1 788, it had 2 1 9 subscribers outside of (Overvoorde, Postweun, 1 28). Calculations on the same basis give a figure of 5,382 copies per issue for 1 787, not far from the estimate derived from the figures for Cerisier's salary if the 1 786 payment of 1 ,400 gulden is interpreted as his bonus. A total circulation of between 5,000 and 7,000 copies per issue during the late 1 780s thus seems a reasonable assumption. 2. The German pastor Wendeborn, the Hamburg paper's London correspondent during the 1 78os, was told that the Hamburg paper reached a circulation of 2 1 ,000 during the American War of Independence. Gebhard F. A. Wendeborn, D. Gebh. Fr. Aug. Wende­ born's Erinnerungen aw seinem Leben (Hamburg: Bohn, 1 8 1 3), 29 1 . During the Napoleonic period, French sources put this paper's press run as high as 56,000. (AN, F 7 346 1 , anonymous note; a more detailed report after the French occupation of Hamburg in 1 8 1 1 gives a figure oho,ooo. AN, F 1 8 1 2 , plaq. 4, report of 26 Aug. 1 8 1 1 .) 3. De Lormes to Luzac, letter of 1 4 J uly 1 783, in LGA-VH , Z(2), no. 55. 4. AN, F 7 3459, police report, n.d. but 1 8 1 0 or 1 8 1 1 . 5 . Jean Luzac to Mercy d'Argenteau, 8 Feb. 1 79 1 , in LGA-VH , Z(2), no. 79.

[ 1 22]

News and Politics in the Age o f Revolution

Vienna, and sales within the capital were presumably at least as large.6 Another counterfeit edition appeared in Naples.7 Five counterfeit edi­ tions with an average press run of 400 copies would have boosted the total circulation of the paper to 7 ,000 to 9,000 during its peak years. Moreover, parts of the paper's contents were disseminated through the reprinting of selected articles in other periodicals. Luzac and other editors had to contend with enterprises such as the Brussels-based Esprit des Gazettes, established in 1 786 with the avowed purpose of "making available to everyone, at a bargain price, all the political news" by system­ atically pillaging the Gazette de Uyde and its competitors; the Esprit des Gazettes differed from other newspapers that lived by reprinting news from their rivals only in that it diligently listed the sources of all its articles.8 Even those who could not read French sometimes found the Gautte de Leyde's stories in their papers. During his term as secretary of state in the first Washington administration, Thomas Jefferson trans­ lated some of the Gazette de Uyde's European reports for the Phila­ delphia GazeUe of tM United States and for several other papers, to offset what he believed were excessively anti-French articles reprinted from the London joumals.9 Through counterfeit editions and reprints of selected news items in other newspapers, Jean Luzac's news-gathering activities had an impact well beyond the circle of readers of the original edition. Several readers undoubtedly saw each copy of the Gazette de Uyde, but it is difficult to calculate the exact extent of this multiplier effect. A copy sent to a large reading room, such as the Grand Societe in The Hague with its 200 members, might have been scanned by as many as several dozen people, whereas a copy sent to a nobleman in the French coun­ tryside might serve no more than a handful. If one accepts a common estimate of 1 0 to 1 2 readers per copy for a typical eighteenth-century periodical, and if one takes the counterfeit editions of the paper into account, the total number of people who held a copy of each issue in their hands during the paper's peak years would have been about 50,000 to 1 00,000. Modest as this figure appears in comparison with the total readership of nineteenth-century or twentieth-century elite news­ papers, it was enough to allow the Gazette de Uyde to serve as the medium for a common political culture spanning much of the European world. The sales and readership of the Gazette de Uyde varied greatly from country to country. Before 1 789, the paper appears to have circulated without censorship restrictions in almost all parts of Europe but it was most in demand in French-speaking countries and in countries with no 6. Strasser, Die Wiener Presse in dtr jouphinischen Ztit, 39-40.

7. Castronovo. Ricuperati, and Capra. lA stampa italiana dal cinquuento oU'ottocento, 35 1 • 8 . Prospectus. Esprit des Gazettes. tipped in at front of V. I . 1 7 86 . in University of Chicago copy. 9. Boyd. ed JeJJtTSon. 1 6: 2 37n-47n. .•

The Gazette de Leyde's Readership significant political press of their own. It is no surprise that France was Luzac's largest single market. The extensive and systematic coverage given to the country's affairs and the lack of comparable newspapers published inside the country made the Gazette de Leyth the kingdom's "newspaper of record." Etienne Luzac's contract with the Dutch post office in 1 772 indicated that more than two-thirds of the copies sent abroad at that date were headed for France and Brabant. 10 The French sales agent assured Luzac that its circulation there in the early 1 780s was considerably higher than that of the other international gazettes, with the exception of the government-subsidized Cou11"ier de ['Europe . 1 1 The figures for sales in France, cited earlier, indicate that peak circulation there during the American war was almost 2 , 500 copies, and the sharp drop in the paper's income from 1 790 to 1 79 2 , reflecting the impact of the loss of the French market to the new domestic papers, is a measure of the paper's earlier dependence on its French readership. The Gazette de Leyth also had readers in other regions of Europe where French was the common language. There was a regular subscription agent in Geneva, where the paper benefited from the absence of a local gazette and from the fact that local authorities had restricted the de­ velopment of the Swiss press in general. 12 The paper printed occasional notices to subscribers in the Austrian Netherlands, which had a signifi­ cant French-language press of its own but one that was prevented from covering local events as fully as many readers would have liked. But the paper also found readers in countries where only the educated elites could read it. In his survey of the European newspaper world, the German diplomat Joachim von Schwarzkopf made special note of the paper's presence in Spain and Portugal. l S In Italy, the American repre­ sentative William Short reported to Jefferson in 1 788 that "the Leyden gazette is not so generally found in the coffee houses as I had imagined," but he did manage to procure copies that were less than two weeks old everywhere he stopped north of Rome. 14 Horace Walpole's correspon­ dent Horace Mann read it regularly in Florence. Copies also went to the European merchant colonies in Turkey. 1 5 The paper had a following i n the German-speaking world, too, de1 0. Contract, 7 Mar. 1 772, in AR, Derde Afdeling, Familiearchief Le Jeune ( 1 7471 8 1 0), inv. no. 27 1 . The contract was based on bundles of go Dutch pounds for France and Brabant, 8 pounds for the postal route via Maseyk (which served southern Germany, Austria, and Italy), and 6 pounds for the route via Emmerich (serving northern Germany and Scandinavia). 1 1 . De Lormes to Jean Luzac, 1 4 July 1 78g, in LGA-VH, Z(2), no. 55. 1 2 . Schwankopf, in Allgemnner Literarische Anzeiger ( 1 800), 1 48 1 -8g. I g. Ibid., 1 46 1 , and ( 1 80 1 ), g1'4-36. 14· William Short to Jefferson, 18 Oct. 1 788, and 14 Jan. 1 789, in Boyd, ed., Jefferson, 1 4 : 28. 15. Mann to Walpole, 2gJuly 1 768 (2g:77), 19 Oct. 1 776 (24:250), 2 7 May 1 783 (25:405) in W. S. Lewis, ed., HfmIU Walpole's CU1Tt!Spondence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1 960-). Schwankopf, in Allgemeinn Literamche Anzeiger ( 1 800), 66.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution spite the competition of French-language gazettes published along the Rhine and of the Hamburg Correspondent, the closest equivalent to the French-language international gazettes. The 1 772 postal contract indi­ cated that slightly more copies went to southern Germany and Austria than to Prussia and Scandinavia. A German satirical print of a news­ paper reading room of 1 788 clearly shows Luzac's journal along with the gazettes of Cologne and Cleves and a variety of German-language pa­ pers, and this reflected the actual practice of well-stocked reading rooms such as the Harmonie establishment in Hamburg. 16 German journalists routinely cited the paper as a publication that their readers would know at least by name. According to a magazine article of 1 79 2 , "a fashionable lady must have at least glanced at the latest numbers of the Moniteur, the Journal de Paris, or the Gazette de Leyde, before she goes to her tea­ party." 1 7 The paper had some sales in Luzac's home country as well, but here, too, it had to contend with competition from well-informed papers in the language of the country. The foreign markets that concerned Luzac most after France, how­ ever, were those in the Baltic states, even though sales there were much lower than in France. Poland, Sweden, and Denmark had only rudimen­ tary domestic presses and the aristocracy read French. The paper's close relationship with reform-minded circles in Poland is well documented, and the paper beq.me a subject of debate in the Diet in 1 774. 1 8 Den­ mark, which lacked even an officially sponsored court gazette, and Sweden depended heavily on the German-language press for their news, but some French newspapers sold there as well. 19 A few copies of the Gazette de Leyde reached Russia, but the small potential audience and heavy censorship apparently kept the paper from finding much of a market there. Of the major language areas of the Western world, the Gazette de Leyde seems to have been least successful in the English-speaking countries, despite Luzac's boast in one letter that the accuracy of his predictions of American success in the revolutionary war was bringing rising sales across the Channel.2o The London papers were not Luzac's equals in obtaining thorough and accurate continental news, but they satisfied the demands of most of their audience. The Gazette de Leyde's primary En­ glish audience was probably the diplomatic community and the editors of English newspapers. During and after the War of Independence , 1 6. Irene Jentsch, Zur Gtschichte des Zeitungshsens in Deutschunul am Ende des 1 8. Jahrhun­ derts (Ph.D. diss., Leipzig, 1 937), 53· 1 7. Journal des L_ Un4 des Moden, 1 792, cited in Elgar Bliihm and Rolf Engelsing, eds., Die Zeitung (Bremen: Schiinemann, 1 967), 1 4 1 -42. 1 8. Lojek, "International French Newspapers and Their Role in Polish Affairs during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century," 54-64. 1 9. Schwarzkopf, in AUgemeiner Literarische Anuiger ( 1 800), 4 1 -43, 49-5 1 20. Notes in margin to letter of the English ambassador Joseph Yorke to the DUlCh States-General, 25 May 1 779, in LGA-VH, Z(2), no. 42.

[ 1 2 5]

The Gazette de Leyde's Readership

American representatives on the continent arranged for the regular dispatch of a handful of copies to the Continental Congress's members back home, and Luzac sent copies to a few other individuals in the American states, but it is doubtful that the paper had any general readership in the New World, either.2 1 Occasional subscriptions went to individuals in European colonies around the world, such as a certain Edmund Morris in Calcutta, whose brother William wrote to Luzac in 1 787 saying that his brother, "being very desirous to have the earliest news from Europe, and being very partial to your Gazette," asked to have his copies sent via the English consul in Aleppo.22 One of Luzac's friends later recalled "meeting at his house travelers arriving from America, from India, from China, who came to tell him how pleased they had been to find his paper in those distant countries, where it was their only way to find out about the political state of Europe."23 The French Revolution brought a sharp change in the paper's reader­ ship: it virtually lost its most important market. Major Paris reading rooms continued to subscribe to the Gazette de Leyde, and even some of the early Jacobin clubs received it, but the paper could hardly hope to compete in the general French market.24 The paper survived this blow, and even prospered during the first years of the Revolution, because rising interest in the news elsewhere in Europe offset this loss. And before long the French Revolution created a new audience for the Gazette de Leyde: the French emigres who formed colonies in towns all over Europe. These displaced aristocrats and well-to-do bourgeois were drawn from precisely the social groups that had always been most inter­ ested in the paper, and their precarious situation made them even more avid for news than they would normally have been. An advertisement for a German grammar in the paper in 1 794 which began, "Since there are now many French who are obliged by existing circumstances to learn German," was obviously addressed to this groUp.25 Even after the French invasion of the Netherlands and the proclamation of the Bata2 1 . Dumas to Congress, 1 7 Apr. 1 777, in AR, Dumas, carton I; Jefferson toJohnJay, 1 7 June 1 785, in Boyd, ed. , JeJft!TSon, 8 : 2 26; Benjamin Gerrish to Luzac, Boston, 2 3 Nov. 1 782, in Huntington Library, Rufus King collection, RK 485 2 2 . William Morris to Luzac, 1 8 Oct. 1 787, in Huntington Library, Rufus King collec­ tion, RK 487. 23. [Baudus], "Notice sur M. Luzac." 24. The Gazette de Leyde appears on the lists of titles available at two important Parisian reading rooms in 1 79 1 , the Chambre patriotique et litteraire and the Cabinet litteraire national. It was one of only two foreign papers available at the former institution, and one of six offered by the latter. Prospectuses in Newberry Library, French Revolution Collec­ tion. A study of Jacobin dubs' newspaper subscriptions in 1 789-9 1 shows that four of them took the paper, compared with thirty-five that subscribed to the popular revolution­ ary Annales patriotiques and twenty-seven that took the Revolution's own '10urnal of rec­ ord," the Moniteur. Michael L. Kennedy, TMJacobin Clubs in eM French Revolutitm: TM First Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1 982), Appendix E. 25. GL, 16 Dec 1 794. .

.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution vian Republic, the paper continued to hold its own against the Paris press, particularly in the newly annexed Belgian departments of France where counterrevolutionary sentiment was strong. French authorities included it in a list of papers whose circulation on French soil was banned on 24 nivose, An VII, but a police report from Bruges six months later indicates that it was still reaching Belgian readers.26 The Revolution thus altered the distribution of the Gazette de Leyde's reader­ ship but did not reduce it so drastically that the paper's survival was threatened. Indeed, as late as 1 807, Etienne Luzac was still confident that the paper could regain its prerevolutionary level of readership on the basis of markets in Belgium and the Rhineland if French political interference could be prevented. 2 7

Readers' Interests The people who sought out the Gazette de Leyde, like all eighteenth­ century newspaper readers, had several motives. As the publisher of another French-language gazette of the period put it, people read news­ papers because "a certain natural curiosity, on the one hand, and our interests, on the other . . . drive us to find out about events in which we have taken and are continuing to take part."28 But the readers of the Gazette de Leyde were either more curious or took a stronger interest in public affairs than most of their contemporaries. They were among those whose interest in public events was so great that they "must have the latest news at all costs, and read the papers daily," rather than the broader public of "the curious who, either because of the number of other things they have to do or because of the location where they live, are not in a position to read all the papers."29 These readers were of necessity fairly wealthy. An annual subscription to the Gazette de Leyde cost 36 livres a year in France, twice as much as the Gazette de France or the Courrier d'Avignon, four times as much as most of the small provincial Affiches , and many times the cost of an ordinary book . The paper's readers were also well educated and could read French. The paper presumed that its audience knew who the sovereigns and leading minis­ ters of major European states were, and it assumed a familiarity with European geography. The dense columns of small type presupposed a readership thoroughly at home with the printed word. Before 1 789, these serious, educated readers shared a clear notion of 26. Documents in AN, F 7 345 1 . 27. Etienne Luzac, letter of 3 1 May 1 807. in LGA-VH , Z(2). no. 1 1 8. 28. Prospectus. Courier Fra1lfois en ftatie (Florence), 1 779, cited in Morelli Timpanaro, "Persone e Momenti," 463. 29. Prospectus, Esprit des Gazettes ( 1 786).

The Gazette de Leyde's Readership

[ 1 2 7]

what a good newspaper should be. For these participants in the era's high culture, the ephemeral newspaper was by definition a lesser form of reading matter: as we have seen, even Jean Luzac himself had item­ ized "the shortcomings of this genre of publication." The standard wisdom held that newspapers were supposed to contain "materials for history" ; they were supposed to serve as modest helps for the produc­ tion of a more important genre of texts. Luzac expressed his distress at the way "the public's demand to have something new" prevented him from fulfilling this documentary function. so Even in their appearance, the newspapers of the continent, unlike their British contemporaries, continued to model themselves after books. The small, two-column format, and preprinted title pages allowed readers to have collections bound in volumes. Although their enterprise was essentially secondary to the production of more prestigious books, journalists still aspired to certain ideals. Writing in the Encyclopidie, Voltaire maintained that "a good gazetteer should be promptly informed, truthful, impartial, simple, and correct in his style; this means," Voltaire added, "that good gazetteers are very rare."S l Baron Bielfeld, author of a standard handbook for diplomats, echoed Voltaire in demanding that journalists limit themselves to "a clear, truthful and succinct narration of public events" and that they eschew all commentary on their news. "A gazetteer who comments is a vulgar person. His reflections are usually either biased, or dictated by corruption, or banal, or wrong." The eighteenth-century public did not trust journalists to shape its opinions: Bielfeld echoed the consensus in insisting that the journalist "should leave to his readers the business of making reflections."s2 Although much of the European press did con­ tain satirical and anecdotal items about important people, it was gener­ ally held that these had no place in a proper newspaper: Voltaire added that "it is unnecessary to say that offensive language should never be employed, under any pretext."ss To be sure, these austere prescriptions were often honored only sporadically. But the Gazette de Leyde prospered precisely because there were some readers who wanted a newspaper that seemed to conform to them. Those who did want a serious newspaper included a number of sov30. Luzac to unidentified correspondent, n.d. but 1 785-87, in LUL, Luzac, carton 28, no. 6g. 3 1 . Article "Gazetier," in Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert, eds., Encycloptdie, ou Dictionnaire raisonni des sciences et des arts et des mitiers, 1 7 vols. (Paris: Lebreton, 1 757-65), 7:535· 32. Jacob Friedrich von Bielfeld, Institutions politiques, 2d ed. (Leiden: Luchtmans, 1 76772), 2 :36g-70. On the period's general rejection of journalists' claims to guide public opinion, see Jack R. Censer, "The Self-Image of the Press: The Prospectus and the Revolutionary Reader," in Pierre Retat, and Jean Sgard, eds., La Fesse devant la Revolution, 1 788-1 79J (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1 989). 33· Article "Gazette," in Diderot and d'Alembert, ed5., Encycloptdie, 7:534.

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News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

ereigns and their familiars: Louis XVI was said to prefer the paper to all others; his aunt, Madame Victoire, had the French ambassador arrange for a personal subscription for her. In 1 784 the French consul in Am­ sterdam undertook to obtain a bulk shipment of the paper to be given out to the courtiers at Versailles.34 Walpole's correspondent Horace Mann reported that Leopold of Tuscany read it.35 Intellectuals with an interest in politics kept up with it. The French philosophe Condorcet used it to keep abreast of the news during his trips away from Paris. From her exile in Switzerland, the Dutch-born Isabelle de Charriere followed events in her native country through its pages.36 Although little can be said about the mass of individual subscribers, since no subscription registers for the paper have survived, certain identifiable social and professional groups depended on its services. The Gautte de Leyde was required reading for all those involved in diplomacy and international affairs. Walpole's correspondent Horace Mann, the British representative at the court of Tuscany, Thomas Jefferson, the American ambassador in Paris, and all the other ambassadors, envoys, secretaries of legations, and hangers-on who clustered around Europe's dozens of large and small capitals relied on the press in general and on the Gautte de Leyde in particular for their overall news. "It had become . . . almost an official part of diplomacy. There was not a minister, not a statesman who did not prefer it to all others," a former correspondent for the paper recalled after Jean Luzac's death.37 Wherever a diplomat might be posted, he needed to stay informed about events all over Europe, since, as the Encyclopedie methodique's article on negotiations put it, "the different European states have so many exchanges and connec­ tions among themselves, that a change in any one of these states is almost always capable of affecting the security of others."38 Baron Bielfeld, as tutor to those entering a diplomatic career, told his pupils that "a negotiator must not neglect to read the public news­ papers . . . , but since they are certainly not all equally good, one must make a choice." He recommended the Dutch papers, specifically includ­ ing the Gazette de Leyde, as they were "less likely than all the others to 34. [Pidansat de Mairobert, attrib.l, MhMires secrets, 28: 1 66 (8 Mar. 1 785); instructions

to ambassador, 1 Aug. 1 772, in MAE, Corr. Pol.-Hollande, 524; Chevalier de Lironcourt

to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, n.d., in Annie Versprille, "Oordeel over de Gazette de Leyde," Jaarboelcje VOUT eeschiedenis en Oudheidkunde van Leiden en Omstreken 52 ( 1 960). 1 6061. 35. Mann to Walpole, 2 7 May 1 783, i n Lewis, cd Walpole CtnTtspondence. 25:405. 36. Condorcet to Mme Suard. n.d. but 1 774. in BN, Ms. N.a.f. 23639, f. 1 9 2 ; lsabeUe de Charriere, letters of 20 June 1 784. February 1 795, 2 Sept. 1 799. in Oeuvres completes. 1 0 vols. (Amsterdam: Van Oorschot. 1 979-8 1 ). 2:626. 5:23. 62 1 . 37. [Baudusl, "Notice sur M . Luzac." 38. Jean-Nicolas Demeunier, in Encyctopedie methodique. Economie politique lit diplmnatique (Paris: Panckoucke. 1 788). 3:406. . •

The Gazette de Leyde 's Readership

[ 1 2 9]

keep things quiet, or to disguise facts that may be disagreeable to certain governments."39 Even though the diplomatic services of major govern­ ments were far more extensive than the network of correspondents that a newspaper could afford to maintain, newspapers such as the Gazette de Leyde filled major needs. They were frequently first with the news: Luzac's paper appeared twice a week, whereas French ambassadors normally wrote to Versailles only once a week. And a paper such as Luzac's solved the problem of communication among embassies in dif­ ferent countries.40 According to one source, the Turkish government, which did not maintain regular embassies in the European capitals, had the Gazette de Leyde translated in order to keep up with foreign affairs.41 Military officers were another professional group with a strong inter­ est in the Gazette de Leyde. Often stationed far from major capitals where decisions to make war were taken, they needed to know about any quarrels that might lead to war and were professionally interested in the events of any conflict. To advertise the value of the index they proposed to include with their paper, the creators of the Esprit des Gazettes cited the example of a reader who might want to know "what a commander in a particular campaign had done."42 Eighteenth-century governments normally provided regular reports about the progress of their armies in the field, but these official sources were always suspected of following one writer's advice to not only "publicize a victory" but "to exaggerate it."43 By bringing together the official bulletins of all combatants in one convenient place, the Gazette de Leyde offered readers who were or had been officers the opportunity to compare conflicting accounts and de­ termine for themselves where the truth lay. The Gazette de Leyde's mili­ tary news was often provided by serving officers and was written for an audience familiar with the technical vocabulary; it presumed that read­ ers would know the organizational structures of major European armies and be able to evaluate the competence of commanders on the basis of their maneuvers. Only in the course of the French revolutionary wars did the paper's military coverage take on a less technical tone and give some indication of the emotional intensity of the battles and of their broader political impact. The Gazette de Leyde's appeal to diplomats and military officers gave it a significant base of readers, but these groups were by no means the only ones interested in the high-quality information the paper purveyed. 39. Bie1fe1d, Institutions politiques, 2 : 369. 40. On the French diplomatic service's internal communications, see us affaires etrangeres et Ie corps diplumatique fra1l{ais, 1 : 2 1 0- 1 3 . 4 1 . [Baudus), "Notice sur M . Luzac." 42. Prospectus, Esprit des Gazettes ( 1 786). 43. Article "Bataille," in Louis de Keralio, ed., Encyclopedie methodique. Art militaire (Paris: Panckoucke, 1 784), 1 : 23 1 .

[ 1 30]

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

Certainly it held a strong interest for officials in the steadily swelling ranks of Europe's numerous bureaucracies. Even those in states with strong censorship laws had other means of keeping up with events taking place in their own country, but they had an interest in knowing what was happening in other countries, and also in keeping up with what was being reported publicly about their own government. The paper was probably equally important to rentiers, those who invested in governments rather than working for them. This was a particularly important social group in the Netherlands, whose capital market remained the most important in Europe down to the time of the revolutionary wars. Dutch investors ' had access to a sophisticated eco­ nomic press, mostly in their own language, which provided them with up-to-date information on market conditions, including the latest changes in commodity and stock prices in London, Hamburg, and other major financial centers.44 But then as now, investors needed the best possible political and diplomatic intelligence, to enable them to forecast events that might affect the market. As historian James Riley remarks, "Such news, and in particular informed speculation about the prospects of war and peace, was important for investment planning."45 It was this need for accurate foreign news that provided the French-language Ga­ zette de Leyde with a steady market in the Netherlands itself, but the rentier class was an international phenomenon, and there is no doubt that part of the paper's appeal in France, as well as in other wealthy communities such as Geneva, was its success in giving investors the confidence that they could make informed choices. Another specialized readership was made up of professionals in the collection and distribution of news. Like most other eighteenth-century editors, Luzac undoubtedly exchanged copies of his paper for other publications as part of his own news-gathering operation. But he cer­ tainly did not provide free copies to the owners of coffeehouses, reading rooms, and other places where readers who did not purchase individual copies came to find newspapers. In Europe as a whole, the number of reading rooms at the time of the French Revolution was probably more than 1 ,000, and the Gazette de Leyde and other international papers were stocked in the larger and more sophisticated ones. Paris alone had more than 600 cafes, and Louis-Sebastien Mercier complained that while literature was discussed in a few of them, "in most, the gossip is even more boring: it is always about the gazette."46 A number of literary 44. l..arry Neal, "The Flow of Financial Information in the Eighteenth Century: London and Amsterdam," paper presented to the Social Science History Association, Chicago, November 1 985. 45. James C. Riley, International Government Fiflanct and the Amsterdam Capital MaTket, 1 740-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1 980), 38. 46. Mercier, Tableau, 1 :227.

The Gazette de Leyde's Readership sources from the period depict the Gazette de Leyde being read in such establishments. In 1 788, Isabelle de Charriere began a play set in a Parisian cabinet de lecture by having one character ask another, "Would you be interested in reading the most recent GazeUe de Leyde ? " The author of the fictionalized memoirs of Countess de la Motte, one of the main figures in the Diamond Necklace scandal, had the countess's hus­ band make a special trip from Edinburgh to Glasgow where he had "remarked that a certain cafe received the Gazette de Leyde" in order to consult its coverage of his wife's tria1.47 Such fictional depictions had a strong base in reality: the Gazette de Leyde appears in the list of journals featured in a number of prerevolutionary reading rooms, such as the Cabinet politique et litteraire of Angers.48 Diplomats, military officers, rentiers, and reading room and coffee­ house owners provided the Gazette de Leyde with a core of regular sub­ scribers. A less stable market of general readers read the papers more out of curiosity than necessity; their interest in the press rose and fell depending on the nature of the news. The number of such readers was certainly significant for the paper's circulation. An exasperated Dutch Patriot critic accused Luzac of neglecting the serious issues of Dutch politics in the 1 780s in order to "pique the curiosity of the public with silly stories like that of the Diamond Necklace . . . [Luzac] seized this opportunity to fill his paper up with such stuff, and that gained him 500 extra subscriptions."49 Whether attracted by professional interest or curiosity, the readers of the Gazette de Leyde came from the wealthiest strata of the European aristocracy and bourgeoisie. The GazeUe de Leyde's advertising was un­ questionably aimed at this "up-scale" market. A statistical analysis of the paid advertisements printed in the last trimester of 1 787 shows that the largest category of commercial advertising in the paper had to do with investment opportunities and announcements directed at holders of various governments' bond issues. A third of the advertisements in the paper fell into this category. Just over a quarter were placed by book­ sellers, but what the Gazette de Leyde promoted was not the common run of new titles. It did advertise specifically political books, but it was equally likely to announce auctions of rare book collections, of interest primarily to wealthy amateurs rather than to ordinary readers. The patent-medicine ads ubiquitous in the eighteenth-century European 47. Isabelle de Charriere, "Attendez revenez ou les delais cruels," ( 1 788), in Oeuvres completes, 7: 1 1 5 ; Memoires jwtiJicatift de La Comtesse de Valois de La Motte Icrit par elle-mime (London: n.p., 1 789), I l l . 48. Franc;ois Lebrun, "Une source d'histoire sociale: La presse provinciale it Ia fin de I'ancien regime. Les 'Affiches d'Angers' ( 1 773- 1 789)," Mouvementsocial, no. 40 ( 1 962), 62, advertisement fOT 1 779. 49. Dumont-Pigalle, "Contre Luzac," in AR, DP, carton 59. ,

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution press were also common in the Gazette de Leyde-these preparations were among the few products that interested members of all social dasses­ but the enticements to bid on jewels from the estate of a titled French aristocrat, the ads for costly French perfumes, and the come-ons for fancy Dutch tulip bulbs clearly were meant for those with substantial discretionary income. The occasional real estate advertisements in the paper almost always promoted seigneurial estates or substantial town­ houses. As an advertising medium, the Gazette de Leyde evidently ap­ pealed above all to entrepreneurs, primarily Dutchmen and Parisians, who were interested in improving the life-styles of the rich and famous, rather than to those seeking to extend the benefits of commercialization to more humble folk. Until the outbreak of the French Revolution, then, the Gazette de Leyde's audience consisted of Europe's cosmopolitan elite, aristocrats and bourgeoisie with a strong interest in political, diplomatic, and military events.

The Art of Reading a Gazette Like a book, a newspaper "can be read in many ways."50 Unfortu­ nately, we have all too few testimonies to the ways in which the Gazette de Leyde's readers engaged themselves with their newspaper. Unquestion­ ably newspapers were read very differently from books. They were by their nature ephemeral works, appreciated only if they were fresh. As Mercier noted, "These details that are so much in demand today, will be completely without interest in two weeks."5 1 Some readers obviously did value their copies of Luzac's paper as a permanent record, else the bound collections preserved in libraries today would not exist, but such serious readers were a minority, and only a reader with a strong profes­ sional incentive, such as the American ambassador to the Netherlands William Vans Murray, would go to the extent of making a personal index to his collection.5 2 Readers who wanted the latest news were likely to set aside scheduled times to read newspapers, times regulated by the predictable schedules of publication and mail delivery. Unlike the book, which accommodated itself to the reader's schedule, the newspaper forced the reader to com­ ply with its schedule. In some cases, a reading group banded together to share the cost of a newspaper subscription and members each had a set time during the day to read the shared copy, before handing it on to the .

.

.

50. Roger Chartier, Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d'ancien regime (Paris: Seuii, 1 987), 1 65 . 5 1 . Mercier, Tableau, 5 : 303. 5 2 . "Diary," vol. for 1 798, in William Vans Murray papers, LC.

The Gazette de Leyde's Readership

[ 1 33 ]

next subscriber.53 Advertisements for newspaper subscriptions in the . prerevolutionary era, before daily papers became common in the French-speaking world, regularly listed the days of the week on which issues would be distributed, and coffeehouse and reading room sub­ scribers undoubtedly knew when they would find new issues in their favorite haunts. Newspaper readers were thus time-conscious readers; newspaper reading served to integrate them into the broader flow of public time, rather than serving, like book reading, as an escape into a private realm divorced from external constraints. The newspaper integrated its reader into the public realm, but read­ ers understood that any one periodical could give them only an in­ complete picture of that public world. Whether they read their news­ papers in public, at a cafe or reading room, or privately at home, dedicated readers rarely limited themselves to a single periodical. The philosophe Condorcet, away from Paris during a vacation, wrote to a friend that "with the daily sheet . . . , the Petites Affiches . . . and the Gazette de Leyde . . . , I occupied myself for the whole morning."54 Condorcet's three periodicals offered three different and complementary kinds of content, but readers often perused several titles offering the same type of content for the purpose of making a critical comparison. The Paris bookseller Simeon-Prosper Hardy recorded one instance of such com­ parative reading involving the Gazette de Leyde in his journal. He had been "singularly struck" by the conflicting accounts of an insurrection on the island of Malta that appeared in the Gazette de Leyde and the Gazette de France. "How can one reconcile two reports of the same event that are so much opposed to each other, and avoid the natural idea that a partisan bias must have influenced one writer or another? . . . most of the intelligent readers will not make up their minds until more information is available."55 Serious readers regarded any one newspaper, including the Gazette de Leyde, as potentially incomplete; they exercised their crit­ ical faculties to determine what was true and what was false. Having perused the texts of various journals, the readers of the eigh­ teenth century were eager to discuss what they had read. Most depic­ tions of newspaper reading from the period show readers in company. Either one member of the group reads a paper aloud to the others, or members of the group combine reading and talk. Being up on the latest 53. Jentsch, ZUT (;eschichte des Zeitungslesens, 37. 54. Condorcet to Mme Suard, n.d. but 1 774, in BN, Ms. N.a.f. 23639, f. 192. Thefeuille dujUUT that Condorcet refers to may have been a manuscript newsletter; there was no daily printed newspaper in France before the establishment of the juumal de Paris in 1 777. 55. Hardy, "Mes Loisirs," entry for 23 Oct. 1 775, in BN, Ms. fro 6682. In this case, Hardy preferred the version printed in the Gazette de France, more anticlerical than the Leiden paper's version. As it happens, Jean Luzac himself later decided that his report of this incident had been misleading. Letter to Grand Master of the Order of Malta, 1 2 Dec. 1 775, in LGA-VH. Z(I). no. 37.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

"The Newspaper Feast" ("Die Zeitungs-Schmaus"). German satirical engraving, 1 788. Note the donkey at right representing a newspaper editor, ingesting newsletters and excreting "bulletins" ready for publication. The Gautte de Divers Endroits on the wall at lower left is probably meant to represent the Gautte de Leyde. Courtesy of Dr. Martin Welke, Deutsche Zeitungsmuseum.

events was an essential part of eighteenth-century sociability. As the marquis de Caraccioli wrote in 1 77 7 , "Whoever does not read gazettes and magazines, might as well consider himself left out of the political and literary world."56 Mercier ridiculed the Parisian consumers of nou­ velles who studied the newspapers "like a lesson they need to memorize" and could then be overheard "talking about cities, fortresses, strong­ points . . . without knowing where they are or what country they belong to," but he admitted that this political news was the main substance of Parisian public conversation. 57 Travel writers made the same point about other parts of Europe, such as the Netherlands.58 The natural extension of this process was for the readers to communi56. Louis-Antoine de Caraccioli, Pans, Ie 7TUKUIe ties nations itTangeres, ou {,EuTopefTaRfaise (Venice and Paris: Duchesne, 1 777), 227-28. 57. Louis-sebastien Mercier, us entTetiens du Palais-Royal (Paris: Buisson, . 786), . 86. 58. Grabner, Bmfe iiber der v"einigten Niederliinde , 285.

The Gazette de Leyde's Readership

[ 1 35 ]

cate to the editors of their preferred periodicals the result of their reflections on its content. This dialogue between readers and journalists was a common feature of many eighteenth-century periodicals, but it was not characteristic of the Gazette de Leyde. Jean Luzac did not publish readers' letters on a regular basis, and the tiny sample of readers whose letters were referred to-only twenty-five from January 1 787 to July 1 78g-tended to be individuals who had been mentioned in the paper, rather than ordinary subscribers. Luzac's extensive correspondence bears no trace of contact with ordinary readers who were not also sources of political information. Prominent intellectual figures, such as Madame de Charriere, occasionally wrote letters to the editor, but these were not published.59 Since subscriptions to the paper were handled by agents in their respective countries, the Luzacs did not even receive routine letters of renewal from individual subscribers. Their foreign subscription agents might forward a general impression of audience reaction to the paper, as the French agent De Lormes did in 1 783, when he told Jean Luzac that "I have always heard your work praised in general, although 1 meet many people who complain that the type size is very small."60 The Luzacs had a general conception of what readers wanted to find in a newspaper: in 1 77 2 , they justified their resistance to French government pressures in terms of their obligation to meet their readers' demands, and, as we have seen, Jean Luzac expressed frustra­ tion at the way readers' expectations forced him to be a journalist rather than a historian.6) But what the Luzacs were responding to was an abstract notion of their readers' interests, communicated indirectly through sales figures. They had little direct contact with their widely scattered audience. The Luzacs were more responsive, of course, when the "reader" of their paper was a sovereign. The occasional editor's notes repudiating reports published a few issues previously were the public signs of this unequal dialogue between the Gazette de Leyde and its most powerful readers. Rulers and ministers might demand such retractions for their own reasons, or to ward off complaints from influential individuals and groups in their own country. Luzac and other journalists, dependent on governments for information and for the opportunity to sell their pa­ pers, rarely resisted these pressures; their general readers probably knew what to make of these forced retractions.62 This distinction be­ tween the paper's responsiveness to public authorities and its indif59. Isabelle de Charriere to Gaulle de Uydt, 20 June 1 784, in Charriere. Oeuvres. 2:626. 60. De Lormes to Luzac, 1 4 July 1 783. in LGA-VH, Z(2), no. 55.

6 1 . Etienne Luzac to Desnoyen, 28 May 1 772, in ibid., Z( I ) . no. 34; Luzac to unidenti­ fied correspondent, in LUL, Luzac, carton 28, no. 69. 62. Jeroom Vercruysse, "La reception politique desjoumaux de Hollande, une lecture diplomatique," in Hans Bots, ed., La diffwion et la kcture desjouTflaux de languefra7lflJise sous {'ancien regime 39-47.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution ference to the private members of civil society who made up its ordinary readership reflected the difference between the eighteenth-century po­ litical gazette and the literary journal. The gazette was part of public life, in an era when rulers were the only acknowledged participants in politi­ cal dialogue; the literaryjournal dealt with matters that were recognized as open for discussion by private individuals. The very existence of such newspapers as the Gazette de Leyde indicated that this distinction was not absolute: by making political news available to anyone with the price of a subscription, Luzac's paper and its rivals gave private members of civil society the raw material for critical judgments of their rulers. But the paper's refusal to publicize the "public opinion" that emerged from these private discussions symbolized its continued adherence to a politi­ cal order in which authority was not formally derived from popular consent. In reading the Gazette de Leyde, ordinary subscribers were simul­ taneously admitted to the realm of public affairs and yet reminded of their powerlessness to affect it. This was a situation that became in­ creasingly difficult to accept as the paper itself, through its content, emphasized the importance of the events shaking the European world in the 1 770S and 1 780s.

The

Gazette de Leyde

and the Crises of the 1 7 70S

T he year 1 77 2 , in which the elder Etienne Luzac summoned his nephew Jean to take over the editorship of the Gaz.eUe de Leyde, was a year during which the paper had many crises to report to its widely dispersed readers. In four states-France, Sweden, Denmark, and Poland-fun­ damental principles of Europe's long-standing order seemed threat­ ened by governments grasping for unrestrained power. According to historian Franco Venturi, the "republican forms of government and those that protected freedom seemed increasingly unable to resist the thrust of absolutism, of standing armies, of bureaucracy, of the diplo­ macy of countries where power was the most centralized."l Contemporary observers recognized these disparate events a s part of

a larger whole. A critic of the measures undertaken in France to strengthen royal authority in 1 77 1 made a direct connection between affairs in his own country and Gustav Ill's coup in Sweden the following year, accusing the French government of revealing its own secret inten­ tions "by its care in propagating the doctrine ofdespotism, by thus publiciz­ ing the acts of other rulers." Linguet claimed that the partition of Poland had marked the moment at which "the terrible principle that force is the strongest argument of kings, so often practiced but always so carefully disguised, was for the first time exposed and put into practice openly and without concealment." 2 1 . Franco Venturi, SeUecmto riformatore (Turin: Einaudi, 1 976-84), 3:xiii. 2.journai historique , 3 :254 (8 Sept . 1 772); An1llJles politiques, 1 :78 (Apr. or May 1 777). In fact, there was a very real connection between the French and Swedish events: the French government had supported Gustav Ill's plan and provided funds for him. Orville Mur­ phy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes (Albany: State University of New York Press,

[ 1 3 8]

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution

Etienne Luzac, who had lent the columns of his newspaper to the defenders of the French parlements for more than twenty years, and whose concern with constitutional liberties in other states had been equally evident, was certainly not indifferent to these crises; his nephew was to engage himself even more deeply in them. The events of 1 772 launched the younger Luzac into an intimate relationship with the revolutions that shook European civilization for the next twenty-five years. As he set about chronicling the complex events of the age of revolutions, Jean Luzac found himself straining the limits within which the European press had learned to operate in its first century and a half of existence. As scrupulous as he might be in assembling the informa­ tion he published, he was simultaneously involving himself in the events his reports described: he had increasing difficulty maintaining the ap­ pearance of impartiality that justified his paper's existence in the face of established governments' claims of a right to control the news. Luzac's correspondence allows us to follow the drama of his efforts to maintain the existence and the reputation of his newspaper and to promote causes he deeply believed in during those decades in which both the European world and the world of journalism were profoundly trans­ formed.

The First Crisis of Liberty, 1 7 7 2 - 1 774 The crisis of constitutional freedom in European politics in the early 1 770S was not just a news story for the Gazette de Leyde: it was also a direct threat to what Etienne Luzac had made of the newspaper since he had become its owner in 1 75 1 . For twenty years, the elder Luzac had labored to make his publication the best source of political news on the conti­ nent, and for twenty years, he had quietly but firmly placed it on the side of those he considered the true defenders of ordered liberty in each major European country. The most long-lasting of these commitments had been his identification with the French parlements in their seem­ ingly unending series of confrontations with the French crown after 1 75 1 . Throughout this period, the Gazette de Leyde had faithfully re­ printed the parlementary remonstrances that constituted the refractory judges' main form of propaganda, and its news stories had consistently reflected a conviction that these judicial institutions were an essential safeguard of French liberty. The paper had documented and applauded 1 982), 1 84-20 1 . Linguet's comments on Poland were paradoxical, in that he had actually put forward his own plan for a partition of the country under French direction in 1 77 1 and in that he was normally a proponent of absolutism, but he nevertheless recognized the significance of what had taken place in 1 772-74.

The Gautte de Leyde and Crises of the 1 770S the parlements' successful campaign for the abolition of the Jesuit Or­ der; it had given sympathetic coverage to the parlements' resistance to new taxes in the wake of the Seven Years' War, remarking that the judges "have redoubled their efforts to maintain the splendor of the crown, without crushing the subjects under new burdens."� In 1 765, when the French government became locked in a struggle with the parlement of Brittany. the paper took up the Breton cause, publishing inflammatory texts in which the judges of the various parle­ ments identified themselves as the only true defenders of the nation's freedoms.4 As this affaire de Bretagne dragged on and became more embittered, the paper publicized the increasingly shrill remonstrances in which the parlementary magistrates denounced the French govern­ ment, culminating in the Paris Parlement's vehement protest of 6 Sep­ tember 1 770 against "the multiplicity of acts committed by an unre­ strained power against the spirit and the letter of the fundamental laws of the French monarchy" which demonstrated "a premeditated project to change the form of government and substitute for the equitable force of the law the unregulated movements of an arbitrary power."5 From this point, events in France moved rapidly to a crisis: on 7 December 1 770, Louis XV's chancellor, Maupeou, forced the Paris Parlement to register an edict disavowing all the court's attempts to restrict the king's powers, and when the judges protested by declaring a judicial strike, they were arrested and exiled on 20 January 1 77 1 .6 The Maupeou "coup" did not immediately change the tone of the Gautte de Leyde's French news coverage. The paper sided emphatically with the exiled judges. It announced that no one in Paris believed that the government could force through its "morally impossible plan for a new court of justice," and it condemned the harsh treatment of the parlementaires, "stuck away in villages where they can hardly find any­ thing to eat."7 But Chancellor Maupeou and his ministerial colleagues, the abbe Terray and the duc d'Aiguillon, intended to go beyond the measures their predecessors had taken in dealing with the parlements 3. GL, 2 Sept. 1 763 (Paris, 26 Aug.).

4. Typical was the remonstrance of the Metz parlement in

1 765, which asserted that the cause of the parlement of Rennes was that of all the courts, and ekpostulated that "if a spirit of indifference [to public affairs] is substituted for the spirit of patriotism, France will continue to have inhabitants, but it will cease to have citizens." Printed in GL, 20 Aug. 1 765 (Paris, 1 2 Aug.). 5. Ibid., 1 8 Sept. 1 770 (Paris, 1 0 Sept.). 6. There has been a considerable outpouring of recent literature on this "Maupeou coup." For a brief summary of events, see Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou RnJolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1 985), 1 -34. A brilliant but regrettably unpublished look at the political causes behind the "coup" is Martin Mansergh, ''The Revolution of 1 77 1 , or the Exile of the Parlement of Paris" (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University. 1 973)· 7. GL. 2 2 Feb. 1 77 1 (Paris. 1 5 Feb.).

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution and their extraterritorial journalistic allies. The duc d' Aiguillon told the French ambassador in The Hague, "It would be very desirable if the Dutch gazettes were more circumspect than they are concerning the details about our internal affairs with which they fill their papers. If they are not more careful and more measured in their reports, they will force us to prohibit the introduction of their papers into the kingdom."8 Several foreign gazettes were banned altogether, and the Gazette de Leyde's issue of 30 July 1 77 1 bore mute witness to the effectiveness of the French government's pressures. The paper, which until then had been full of reprinted remonstrances denouncing the court reform plan, suddenly fell silent on French affairs. For the next two and a half years, the Gazette de Leyde could do little more than print the official edicts put out by the ministers and the remodeled "Maupeou parlements." - Behind the scene, Etienne Luzac exchanged angry letters with the French ambassador in The Hague, complaining about the way in which the Maupeou government was changing the traditional rules of the journalistic game. "For more than a century, . . . the authors of periodi­ cals have been able to publish edicts, remonstrances, and other pieces relative to political matters," he protested. "I have done so myself for fifty years and no minister has ever taken offense." He pleaded for the French government to consider "the delicacy of my situation. How can 1 satisfy the readers, on the one hand, who want to be accurately informed about political affairs, and on the other hand, those who are involved in these affairs? If a public newspaper leaves out everything the people in high office in all European countries would like kept secret, would this paper deserve the public's confidence and esteem? Would it keep any of its readers?"9 But the French government remained implacable. The French ambassador warned Etienne Luzac, "If you do not change your correspondents, you will lose your readers permanently," 1 0 and the Gazette de Leyde had to recognize that if the restructuring of the French government undertaken by Maupeou and his colleagues succeeded, the scope of the journalistic freedom permitted to the extraterritorial press would be reduced for good. Meanwhile, other pressures on the Gazette de Leyde intensified. The Danish government complained vociferously about the paper's refusal to endorse the charges brought against the arrested minister Struensee, whose reforming efforts fell victim to a palace coup in February 1 77 2 . 1 1 8. AiguiUon to Noailles, 28 Apr. 1 77 1 , in MAE, Corr. Pol.-Hollande. 523. 9. Etienne Luzac to Desnoyers, secretary of the French embassy in The Hague. 5 July 1 772 . 27 May 1 772. in LGA-VH. Z( I). no. 34. 10. Desnoyers to Etienne Luzac, 27 May 1 77 2 . in MAE, Corr. pol.-Hollande, 524. 1 1 . The French ambassador in The Hague reported that the Danes had singled out the Gazette de Leyde for special attention in this regard. Desnoyers to Aiguillon. 1 7 July 1 772, in MAE. Corr. Pol.-Hollande. 524.

The Gazette de Leyde and Crises of the 1 770S The paper's judgment on the fallen minister had been nuanced, con­ cluding that his reforms had been motivated by good intentions "but the changes were too sudden and carned out too brusquely." 1 2 But this did not satisfy the victors in Copenhagen. In response, Etienne Luzac warned the Danes that he had already rejected similar complaints from France. "You would not want an honest man to act like the most vile populace or the most insipid flatterers, by judging a minister simply because he is a prisoner," Etienne Luzac wrote to the Danish minister in The Hague, ending with the emphatic declaration, "I will never depart from the truth, either out of enmity or from a desire to please men in high places." 1 3 The paper made no effort to conceal its condemnation of the hasty execution of Struensee, saying that his conduct on the scaffold dis­ proved the charges that he was an atheist and a libertine, and labeling the whole sequence of events in the Scandinavian kingdom "this tragic affair." 1 4 The Danish authorities continued to complain, finally driving Etienne Luzac to tell the Danish ambassador that if he acceded to Copenhagen's demands, "it would be a major point gained, especially for those who fear that their conduct cannot stand the light of day, and I would invite all the Oriental princes to come learn from our reports political lessons and principles of which they have certainly been igno­ rant up to now." 1 5 Denmark was small and relatively powerless, so the Gazette de Leyde could afford this haughty tone, but two years of such exchanges could only contribute to the editor's sense that not only liberty but his own publication were under siege. Gustav Ill's coup against the aristocratic faction in the Swedish Diet in 1 772 brought the paper into conflict with one more northern court. As in the case of Denmark, the paper did not openly condemn the changes, but it ex­ plicitly warned readers not to accept everything the victors said against the defeated party. "As in all revolutions, the people of Sweden gives the appearance of accepting the change that has just occurred with joy," one of the Gazette de Leyde's early reports from Hamburg began, "but it has been learned that the new form of government has been rejected in several places, among others in Gothenburg." 16 Even more than Denmark and Sweden, however, it was Poland that preoccupied the paper after it was forced to mute its coverage of French events. The paper's interest in Polish politics was not new. Even if Dutch republicans could be forgiven for not wanting to acknowledge the sim1 2. GL, 4 Feb. 1 772 (Leiden, 3 Feb.). 13. Etienne Luzac to De la Pottrie, letters of ? Mar. 1 772 and 13 Mar. 1 772, in LGA-VH , Z( I ), nos. 33, 34. 1 4. GL, 1 5 May 1 772 (Hamburg, 8 May). 1 5. Etienne Luzac to Danish ambassador, 14 Apr. 1 774, in LGA-VH. Z( I ), no. 34. 1 6. GL, 22 Sept. 1 772 (Hamburg, 15 Sept.).

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution ilarities between the two countries' weak central institutions, the Nether­ lands was vitally interested in Polish trade and the fate of the Polish kingdom was always a matter of immediate concern to the Dutch. When Stanislas-August Poniatowski-who had been impressed by visits to the Netherlands as a young man-came to the Polish throne in 1 764 and began to try to reform the country's archaic institutions, the Gazette de Leyde printed coverage supportive of his efforts. 17 At the beginning of 1 768, it began its reporting of a new session of the Polish Diet with the remark, "What is now happening in this Kingdom marks a new epoch for us in this century of reform." 18 By 1 77 2 , the paper recognized that Polish reform was going to have to be purchased at the price of cessions of territory to the kingdom's three powerful absolutist neighbors, Prus­ sia, Russia, and Austria. The Gazette de Leyde made itself a conduit for King Stanislas-August's hopes to achieve significant internal reforms that would revitalize the country and, to some extent, offset the disaster of the First Partition. With the king himself arranging to supply the paper with articles, it is not surprising that the paper expressed the hope that his program would succeed and "make the basis of this government more conformable to reason and order . . . . Polish freedom, that is, the despotism of the magnates, may suffer as a result of the project at­ tributed to the Allied Powers, but true freedom and justice will rejoice in advance at the destruction of these pretended rights, which outrage humanity." 19 While the paper was careful to avoid outspoken criticism of the parti­ tioning powers, it was unmistakably sympathetic with the cause of Polish independence and sought to remind the states of western Europe that they had at least an economic stake in Polish freedom: "The trading nations cannot help being alarmed at the possible disappearance of one of the principal branches of their commerce, and at the disruption or total cut-off of exchanges by arrangements contrary to liberty, without which trade cannot survive."2o The paper's coverage served to counter the propaganda in favor of Prussia and Russia emanating from many of the leading French philosophes. 2 1 This position matched the policy of the French government as well, which viewed the First Partition with alarm but was unable to prevent it; at a time when the paper was in potential conflict with Versailles over its attitude toward French affairs, 1 7. Jean Fabre, Stanislas-Augwte Poniatowski tl ['Europe des [umreres (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1 952), 1 8 1 , 1 84. 18. GL, 5 Jan. 1 768 (Warsaw, 15 Dec. 1 767). 1 9. Ibid., 9 June 1 772 (from the Vistula, 28 May). On the paper's connection with Stanislas-August in this period, see Fabre, Stanislas-Auguste, 475. 20. GL, 30 Nov. 1 773 (Poland, 1 5 Nov.). 2 I . On the extent and effects of the philosophes' support for their heroes Frederic II and Catherine II, see Fabre, Stanislas-Augwte, 359.

The Gazette de Leyde and Crises of the 1 770S the coincidence of its views with those of the French over the Polish issue may have helped smooth over the difficulties between France and the Luzacs. Unable to mount a frontal assault on Poland's foreign enemies­ although its coverage inspired a vehement Prussian protest-the Gazette de Leyde distinguished itself by its ferocity toward their agents within the Polish Diet. 22 Its main target was Adam Poninski, whom it accurately identified as the principal Russian agent in that body. Although the Diet sessions in 1 773 were supposed to be secret, the paper managed through its connection with Stanislas-August to obtain summaries of the debates and texts of some major speeches, including Poninski's.23 The king's opponents had destroyed all hostile newspapers in the country, leaving only one pliable journal there. 2 4 This meant that the Gazette de Leyde and the Courier du Bas-Rhin, with which Stanislas-August had entered into arrangements in late 1 77 2 , had to serve as the king's main organs, not only for appealing to foreign public opinion but for address­ ing Poles who were able to read French.25 The Gazette de Leyde was sufficiently successful in this role for Poninski to denounce it openly in the Diet, which duly voted to ban the paper's circulation in Poland. Writing in his own name, the paper's editor responded to the news of this ban with an even more explicit denunciation of Poninski for lining his own pockets at his country's expense: "One needs considerable resources to rise so quickly from a mediocre situation to the most mag­ nificent opulence." And, referring to the dismissal of the unpopular French ministers d'Aiguillon, Maupeou, and Terray after Louis XV's death in 1 774, the paper warned Poninski that "there is an end to all things, and . . . disgraces are all the more striking, when the motives that inspire them need no justification."26 From Warsaw, the outraged Poninski appealed to the Estates of Hol­ land to take action against the editor of the Gazette de Leyde, who "instead of showing the natural comprehension of one republican for another, has continually put the most innocent actions in the most odious light. "27 The Luzacs, who had just witnessed the disgrace of their en­ emies in France, seized the opportunity to respond aggressively: they answered Poninski's one-page letter of complaint with a twenty-four2 2 . Thulemeyer (Prussian ambassador to The Hague) to States-General, 29 Dec. 1 774, in LGA-VH, Z( I ) , no. 36. 23. GL, 2 1 May 1 773 (Warsaw, 5 May); and 8 June 1 773 (Poland, 2 1 May). 24. Julien Grossban, "La presse polonaise et la Revolution fram,;aise," Annales hisklriques de La RJvolutWnjra7l{lJise 1 4 ( 1 937), 1 43. 25. Lojek, "International French Newspapers and Their Role in Polish Affairs during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century," 60. 26. GL, 6 Sept. 1 774 (Leiden, 5 Sept.). 27. Poninski, letter of 1 9 Sept. 1 774, in LGA-VH, Z( I ), no. 35.

News and Politics in the Age of Revolution page statement of principles and an additional eight pages of hand­ copied citations from other European newspapers. The Polish count was not "a sacred person," and the Luzacs demanded to know "where the law of nature states that no one can speak critically of him."2 s Located far from the scene, the Gazette de Leyde could not really hope to affect the outcome of the Polish crisis ; its pro-Polish publicity was no match for the armed might of the partitioning powers. But its narration of the Polish crisis embarrassed and irritated the Polish agents of the partitioning powers, and served to make the opponents of partition appear as models for emulation elsewhere because of their willingness to put the defense of their country's independence above selfish private interests. Casting the Polish Patriots as heroes, the paper helped offset the admiration expressed by many of the philosophes for the enlight­ ened absolutist rulers who were undermining the country, and it helped prepare readers to react appropriately to other struggles for liberty about to bre